


make me mended

by alderations



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Abduction, Arguing, Backstory, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Cults, Domestic, Eating Disorders, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, First Meetings, Fluff, Human Sacrifice, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, Mad Science, Medical Procedures, Mutual Pining, Nightmares, Painkillers, Physical Therapy, Poison, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Rescue, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Sparring, Stabbing, Surgery, Temporary Character Death, Torture, Trans Character, Trauma, Unethical Medicine, Wings, tags will be updated by chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:01:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27394636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: "It’s—I—there’s this scientist, a doctor, and I know very little about her, except for that she found a way to make people immortal. Really, truly immortal,” Raphaella says.Marius swears that his heart stops at those words. “So you…?”“Yeah. I’ve died… a few hundred times since then, but it never sticks. As far as I can tell, it worked.”
Relationships: Raphaella la Cognizi/Marius von Raum
Comments: 107
Kudos: 123





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some CWs for the first chapter:  
> -descriptions of war zones and gun violence  
> -injury  
> -discussion of unethical human experimentation  
> -medical malpractice (to say the least)  
> -description of infected wounds  
> -description of surgery  
> -temporary character death  
> -emetophobia  
> -medical procedures, including blood transfusions & IVs  
> -painkillers/drugs
> 
> stay safe & please let me know if you need anything else tagged!

Of all the miserable, crumbling planets Raphaella has ever seen, this one may be the most depressing.

She has to launch herself on unsteady wings from one pile of rubble to the next, since what’s left of the road is too littered with debris to walk safely, but this also makes her a target for the people scurrying around the wreckage and firing off occasional shots at anything that moves. When she first landed here, she was hoping to restock on food and fuel in addition to potential test subjects, but the longer she watches the denizens of this world, the more her hope dwindles. She hasn’t seen a single vehicle since she landed, much less another starship. And as far as she can tell, most of the people here are too scrawny to survive even a single round of experiments.

Right before she can turn around and head back to her ship, she catches a glimpse of metal shining in the sunlight, off in the distance. Of course, she changes course and flies straight at it, despite the old-fashioned bullets whizzing past her wings; her curiosity will always get the best of her.

She makes her landing only a few yards away from the crumpled metal. Close up, it shines in a dozen long-tarnished colors that were probably brilliant and, honestly, quite garish when the machine was new. There’s not much sense to be made from the jumble of massive limbs and wings. Raphaella is about to leap on top of the thing and take some samples of the scratched-up metal when a voice breaks through her train of thought.

“Alright, I think I’ve finally lost it if I’m seeing  _ angels  _ now.”

Raphaella startles, searching for the source of the voice until, at last, she finds a bloodied and grease-stained face grinning up at her from between two twisted metal claws. It’s a boy, likely younger than she was when she was—when she became what she is now. Maybe nineteen or twenty. He reclines against the metal wreck in a way that could almost be casual, if it weren’t for the fact that his right arm is obviously pinned under it. “I am not an angel, believe me,” she says, once the initial surprise wears off.

Despite his roguish grin, Raphaella can tell that this young man is in immense pain. Probably feverish, too, given his flushed cheeks and sweat-slicked hair. “Shame. I was hoping you’d come to put me out of my misery.”

Normally, she would. Raphaella has killed thousands of people, in her lab and on the streets of a hundred half-cursed planets, and while few of those murders could be considered mercy killings, she’s had her moments. Given the substantial pool of blood under this man’s crushed arm, now should probably be one of those moments. “I could do that. What’s in it for me?”

He looks at her as if she has three heads, in addition to the wings. “Look, I might be on the wrong side of malnourishment, but I’m still worth a few good meals. Just, well, probably make sure this arm is well-done if you don’t want a nasty case of… I dunno. Whatever grows on the underside of an old mecha, I guess.”

“I… ah.” Raphaella doesn’t know how to respond to that. She’s met some fucked-up people, especially in the early days, when she would actively  _ advertise  _ for test subjects. Still, this is the first open invitation to cannibalism that she’s ever received, which gives her a good picture of this world’s situation. “I’ve, um, got plenty of food on my ship, actually, but… thanks for the offer? Now that I think of it, if  _ you’ve  _ been eating a lot of human flesh, your biology might be—”

“Your—your  _ ship?” _

Raphaella stops short. The man is sitting up now, despite the obvious strain on his crushed arm, and the dying sunlight catches in his jet-black eyes, illuminating a hunger that reaches far deeper than anything physical. If he hadn’t just begged her to kill him, she might call it a will to live. Or curiosity, like her own. Maybe just sheer madness. “My starship,” she clarifies. “It’s not far from here. I was just going to salvage some samples and then head off, since there’s clearly not much to be gained from sticking around here.”

“You can  _ leave,”  _ he breathes. “You—you could get me  _ out  _ of here.”

She could. Whether he’ll be alive at the time, she’s not sure. “Hypothetically.”

“Please.”

Taking a moment to gauge the weight of the metal crushing his arm, the amount of blood coagulating under his body, the fire in his eyes and the desperate rasp in his voice, Raphaella makes a decision somewhere along the lines of  _ ah, what the hell.  _ As it turns out, the metal isn’t too heavy for her to lift once she gets her wings under her, and the man rolls away as soon as he’s no longer pinned. His arm is lacerated in a few places and bruised a sickly purple-black around his wrist, and judging by the smell alone, it’s  _ very  _ infected. “Can you stand?” she pants as she drops the massive claw into the dust where he lay moments before.

The man makes a valiant effort, bracing himself against the bloodied metal, before slumping back to the ground again. Raphaella isn’t surprised. “Not looking good,” he says cheerily.

“I’ll carry you. I’ll have to walk, though; we’ll be too obvious a target if I fly.”

His eyes somehow go even wider. “I’ve got no room to complain, but also, if you  _ did  _ want to fly, that would be fucking incredible.”

“Next time.” He doesn’t need to know that there won’t be a next time. As she scoops him up and starts picking her way through the rubble, Raphaella mentally combs through the best ways to test for prion disease, and to culture whatever horrific bacteria are growing in his arm, and to start recording these things without raising suspicion while he’s still alive. He’ll be an absolute treasure trove of data. “What’s your name?” she asks off-handedly, mostly so she has a way to label her files later.

He grimaces. “I’m, uh. Byron. von Raum.”

That is, of course, the exact moment that a random soldier comes careening down the road, guns blazing. Someone else shoots them before they can get any closer, but that doesn’t fix the ringing in Raphaella’s ears. “Did—did you say you’re a  _ baron?” _

“I. Uh.” The man’s face flushes red, though that could just be the fever. “Yep. That’s me. Baron von Raum.”

It’s an obvious lie, but given the face he made when she asked his name, it’s probably more comfortable than whatever he was going by before. “Honored to make your acquaintance. Any tips for, um, not getting shot to pieces down here?”

“Don’t be six foot tall with glowing wings, for starters.”

Raphaella isn’t six feet, but she doesn’t correct him. “Touché. Can you shoot?”

He snorts. “I can try.”

“My gun’s at my right hip. If you can reach it, feel free to take out anyone else who tries to attack us.”

The Baron startles at the first ball of plasma he shoots from the gun, but he overcomes his unease when he realizes how much damage it can do. As it turns out, he’s a decent shot for someone with one working arm and a raging fever. They make it back to the ship relatively unscathed, and Raphaella soaks in the way he gawks at its every detail as she ascends the landing ramp and shuts it immediately after them.

Once inside, she carries the Baron to her lab and sets him down on the cleaner of her two exam tables. He’s still bleeding, even though he really ought to have run out of blood by now. “Alright, von Raum, you’re going to need a real first name if you plan on running a barony. Any ideas?”

Now that they’re sheltered from any direct gunfire, he looks ready to melt into the cold metal. That’s good, probably, since it means he’ll be too tired to put up a fight when she starts working on him. “Been thinking… Marius,” he slurs. “Baron Marius. Ooh, that’s a bit of a tongue-twister, huh? Baron Marius. Baron Marius. Ba—”

“Yes, it’s delightful,” Raphaella soothes him as she turns on the blood synthesizer and then starts palpating his wrist for veins. He’s  _ wildly  _ dehydrated. “Alright, then. Marius. If you want to live for more than a few hours, things are going to get… unpleasant.”

“I figured as much.” His words are starting to blend together, and Raphaella gives the synthesizer a subtle kick as it whirs to life. “I guess you probably shouldn’t eat me, since I’ve got… I dunno. My blood is probably fucked up.”

That’s an understatement, though Raphaella doesn’t say so out loud, nor does she warn him before inserting the IV catheter and starting the transfusion. He barely reacts. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, obviously,” she says, watching the synthesizer’s screen as it analyzes his biochemistry and gets to work replicating what he needs. “So I have to replace that, and if the infection doesn’t kill you first, I’ll start you on some antibiotics. Unfortunately, I’m running quite low on painkillers.”

“‘S fine,” he mumbles. “Never had ‘em before. Arm’s been crushed for a few days anyway.”

No wonder he’s so dehydrated. “That arm is an issue in and of itself, but we’ll deal with that… later. Once you’re not actively dying.” Or after he dies, though she really wants to pick his brain—literally and figuratively—before that happens.

Unlucky for her, Marius is unconscious before she can finish warning him of what’s next.

Marius wakes up in a bed for the first time in years.

He smells something sharp and acrid first, like vodka but not as sweet, and as he forces his eyes open, he’s startled by how  _ clean  _ everything is. White sheets, dark blue blanket, fluorescent lights that buzz dully over his head. It might be the farthest possible thing from the rubble of a city where he’s spent the last nineteen years of his life, and he’s not about to complain now.

He’s not sweating quite as much as when he was still trapped under his mecha, which is hopefully a good sign, though one glance down at his half-bandaged arm tells him that it hasn’t been magically cured since he passed out. In a rush, he remembers the bizarre angel who dragged him out of the wreckage and carried him back to her—her  _ starship.  _ He’s in a ship! He might even get  _ off  _ of this godforsaken planet! Emboldened by the thought, Marius pushes himself up with his good hand and slowly turns until he can plant his feet on the floor.

The IV still poking out of his arm doesn’t help his mobility much, but he quickly figures out that the fluids actively pumping into his veins are attached to some kind of mobile contraption that he can push along as he explores the room. Aside from the tiny cot in one corner, the lab is alien to him. He passes by all kinds of machinery and implements that he can’t even imagine how to use, and between them all, heaps of notebooks and clipboards covered in a shaky scrawl in a language he doesn’t understand. There are a couple of exam tables, one still littered with blood-soaked gauze. Marius only makes it to the first before he has to lean against the cool metal and fight off a wave of nausea.

It’s only then, as he realizes just how bad his wounds must be, that the weird not-angel returns. “Oh, you’re out of bed! Or—um, you look like you should still be  _ in  _ bed, I think.”

Marius attempts a winning smile, though he’s dizzy enough that it’s probably more of a grimace. “I’m awake, and that’s what matters, yeah? I have some—some questions about all this… science stuff.”

“You’re going to have to wait,” she responds coolly. “You really need to rest, unless you want the infection to get to your bloodstream any faster. Frankly, I’m shocked that you’re standing at all.”

He grumbles as she grasps his elbow and steers him back toward the bed, but he doesn’t actually resist, especially once he flops back down and realizes how weary he is just from taking a few steps. “I made it this long. I’ll be fine.”

“That arm needs to be amputated.”

Cold fear spikes through Marius’s stomach. “Anyone ever tell you your bedside manner is shit?”

“I’m not used to my sub—my  _ patients  _ being, uh, conscious,” she says, flipping a few locks of golden hair over her shoulder. “This is… not my field of expertise.”

“I guess I can’t complain, given that I thought you were bringing me back to your ship just to eat me in peace.”

The way she tilts her head to regard him makes him think that she hasn’t ruled out the possibility. “You said you wanted to get off the planet. You’re off the planet.”

Marius could swear that his heart stops as he processes her words.  _ Off the planet.  _ There’s no way… he would’ve felt the ship taking off, right? They always seemed like loud, lumbering things, even compared to his mecha, and he knows he’s a light sleeper. He wouldn’t have survived this long otherwise. “Come again?” he asks, once he remembers how to form words.

“We took off about an hour ago, after your condition stabilized,” says the angel. Marius is positive that she’s an angel at this point. “We’re orbiting the planet now. It’s just empty space up here, for the most part. Not much interplanetary travel in this sector.”

“No, there’s not,” Marius confirms. “But—wait,  _ seriously?  _ How did I sleep through that?”

She shrugs. “My ship’s pretty quiet. And you were pretty close to dying, honestly.”

He’s been pretty close to dying for his entire life, but he doesn’t tell her that, especially since she’s studying him as if he’s a freshly-fileted fish and she’s not sure how best to season him. “I’m too stubborn to die,” he says instead, since it’s certainly true.

“Here’s hoping.” She doesn’t actually sound all that hopeful.

As she fidgets with the IV fluids and double-checks that his catheter is still in place, Marius finally remembers that he knows absolutely nothing about the winged woman currently administering unknown liquids directly into his blood. “I, uh, don’t believe I ever caught your name?” he prods, offering the friendliest smile he can manage.

“Raphaella,” she answers, with the unique satisfaction of someone who’s put a lot of thought into their own name. No wonder she didn’t bat an eye at him pulling a name out of nowhere. “Yes, the wings are real, yes, I can fly, no, I wasn’t born this way.”

“I—um. Okay?”

She raises an eyebrow at him, then shakes her head at his utter confusion. “I get the same questions a lot. If it weren’t for all the language barriers, I’d print business cards.”

Marius starts to laugh at that, until a sharp ache in his chest stops him. Honestly, he wouldn’t be remotely surprised if he has a few cracked ribs, after the week he’s had. “Back to the—the, um—amputation. I know it’s probably broken pretty bad, but… why?”

“I can show you,” she offers, though hesitation in her voice is clear. “It doesn’t look good, though.”

He has almost definitely seen worse. “I can handle it.”

When she picks up his arm with delicate fingers and unwraps the bandages, Marius quickly realizes that he cannot handle it. The smell alone is enough to convince him, but once he gets an eyeful of his own blackened, bloated fingers, he has to turn away and bite his tongue to keep from retching. “Alright, yeah, I get your point,” he admits through gritted teeth. “Is this—the stuff in the IV. It’s not medicine?”

“Oh, it is,” she assures him as she rewraps the wound. “You’re on a half dozen different antibiotics right now, and I have a few more to try in case those don’t take care of the infection. The necrotic tissue still has to go.”

Those words are enough to make Marius’s stomach roil. “That seems like a lot of effort to go through for a dying asshole who you dug out from under an old mecha.”

Something stony and uncomfortable transforms Raphaella’s face, and she takes a step back after securing the bandages on Marius’s arm. “I never said that I actually  _ plan  _ to amputate it.”

Before he can find a way to respond, she turns on her heel and stalks out of the lab, leaving Marius alone with his returning fever.

It’s been at least a century since Raphaella had an actual human companion aboard her ship. She doesn’t always kill her research subjects right away, but she tends to keep them unconscious until she can, if only to avoid any awkward conversations or tiresome screaming. In fact, the only reason she hasn’t knocked Marius out already is that she’s not sure he’d survive it, not to mention that she wasn’t lying about running low on painkillers.

All of this means that she is, for the first time in  _ many  _ years, acutely aware of her own loneliness. She wouldn’t use the word  _ loneliness,  _ per se, because Raphaella has never been too reliant on human companionship. But her heart flutters and her chest lightens every time she steps into the lab to check on her latest subject, which means that the biological imperative of “spending time with other sentient beings” is getting to her at long last. It doesn’t help that Marius is remarkably charming for a half-dead mostly-insane mecha-piloting orphan from a planet that has never known anything but war.

She’s certainly never seen someone act so cheerful with an entire limb slowly rotting off their own body.

After three days of increasingly potent antibiotics, Raphaella decides that delayed gratification will be worth it. She  _ will  _ dissect his brain eventually, but not until she’s seen just how much sepsis he can survive, not to mention the way it affects his… interesting psyche. Despite what she told him, she’s willing to amputate at any time—the arm will be an interesting specimen, and it  _ will  _ kill him before long, but he’s adamant about keeping it the way it is. She could easily sedate him and chop the damn thing off without his permission, but she figures that can wait until she has no other choice.

This morning—or, well, whatever time in deep space that she happens to wake up—she brings him a bowl of thick oatmeal with a few freeze-dried berries, which he gawks at with eyes that could be shining with either excitement or fever. “What are the red bits?” he asks, poking one with his spoon while Raphaella watches.

“Raspberries. Freeze-dried, ‘cause they get moldy in about three seconds if they’re fresh.”

Marius takes an eager bite, and his face scrunches up. “Oh. Sour! That’s sour!” Before he can finish chewing, he’s already stuffing more oatmeal into his mouth, picking out the raspberries so he gets one in each bite until they’re gone. “Those are… whoa.”

“Whoa?”

“Fucking amazing,” he elaborates, covering his mouth with his good hand. “I’ve never had that before. Are they, like, candy?”

Raphaella raises an eyebrow. “They’re fruit. I picked those up… oh, at least a dozen planets ago. Not sure where. They’re not too hard to find, though, people love to take plants with them on interstellar flights, challenging as it may be.”

_ “Fruit?”  _ Marius’s eyes go impossibly wide. “I just—I feel like I should be paying you, but—you just fed me  _ fruit?  _ For breakfast? Any old day of the week?”

She adds this conversation to her list of mental notes on Marius’s home planet. It’s not a pretty picture. “Yes? You look like you could use some vitamin... I was about to say C but, like, any vitamins whatsoever.”

The look on his face makes it abundantly clear that he has no idea what a vitamin is, but he grins up at her all the same. “Vitamins! Yes! I, uh, I don’t think I’ve had those before. We only had pears back home, and they only grew on these trees that would sprout in the middle of the fucking concrete. Bland as hell. More like rocks than fruit, honestly.”

“Well, once you’re… less infected, I’ve got a few things for you to try,” Raphaella chirps, already planning an experimental design. A sample size of one is less than ideal, but this is more for fun than rigorous data. “And I’ll need to stop to pick up some painkillers, if I’m going to amputate that arm, so I’ll see if I can find any other fruit while I’m at it.”

At the mention of his arm, Marius’s face closes off again. “Yeah. That’s… you can do that, I guess.” He takes another, bigger bite of oatmeal and pretends to focus all his attention on the bowl. “Thanks for the food.”

“Of course. I’ll just—I’ll be organizing my notes, if you need anything.”

Her notes have never been organized before, and she’s not about to change that, but she needs a minute to keep her hands busy and let herself think. She just offered to buy  _ fruit  _ and  _ drugs  _ for a research subject, and one that’s been alive and relatively conscious on her ship for three days. If she doesn’t curb herself soon, she won’t want to kill him. That’s not a path she’s ready to traverse again.

For her first few centuries of immortality, she would occasionally pick up companions, as lab assistants if nothing else. But those companions got hurt and died, or they left her when they realized that calling herself a mad scientist wasn’t remotely a joke. She has no higher cause, no tragic backstory, nothing to justify her work outside of a near-biological need to know more about the universe. That’s not enough for most people, as it turns out, and as cold-hearted as she is, Raphaella has never handled abandonment well.

So, all things considered, she needs to kill Marius before he starts worming his way into her heart.

As she’s pondering this and pretending to dust around the machinery in her lab, her fingers graze over a thick, thoroughly bloodstained manila folder tucked behind her largest centrifuge, where she generally doesn’t have to think about it. If she had more presence of mind, she’d avoid it, but it’s too late now. As she pulls it out into the light and flips through its contents, something dangerous begins to coalesce in her head.

Most of the pages are diagrams—her wings, the ports on her back, even microscopic sketches of the nanobots she pulled from some old research linked to King Cole’s war efforts. At the end, however, after she woke up and washed off the blood and left the lab where she killed her one existing friend, Raphaella drafted a few blueprints for other mechanisms. Now, she recognizes that she was only sketching metal body parts in a haze of depression and self-isolation, but the designs are still sound. A metal eye, a metal kidney, a metal tongue.

A metal arm.

She takes a deep breath, as quiet as she can, and closes the folder before sliding it back behind the centrifuge, telling herself that she can forget about it for another century.

By his fifth day on Raphaella’s ship, Marius can no longer ignore the streaks of hot inflammation spreading up from the bandages on his arm. He’s back to sweating non-stop, and half the time, he’s not sure whether Raphaella is actually in the room with him or if he’s imagining her in a delirious haze. She keeps reminding him that the arm needs to be amputated. Marius can’t even describe why he’s so afraid of that thought, but it feels like a rational fear, in his mind; how is he supposed to pilot a mecha or shoot a gun or, hell, be a good lab assistant while he wheedles for his life if he’s only got one arm? He knew plenty of amputees back home, and most of them got by just fine, as much as anyone could on a war-torn world that was rotting from the inside. On the other hand, most of them had family or friends who actually cared about them, rather than one mad scientist who could kill them for fun at any moment.

He snaps out of his contemplative haze at the  _ hiss  _ of the landing ramp closing. “Raphaella?” he calls, heart pounding in his ears—he didn’t hear her leave, but he’s not even sure that he’s conscious right now.

“It’s just me,” she responds. Moments later, she enters the room and crosses over to his bed with a few brisk strides, a handful of bags hanging from her arms. “I stocked up while you were asleep. I have everything I need to—for the surgery.”

Marius bites his lip. “I was asleep?”

“I can feel your fever from here,” she says, sitting down on the side of the bed. There’s concern in her eyes, and Marius is delirious enough to believe that it’s genuine. “I… We need to talk.”

“Go for it.” He sits up in bed, wobbles a bit, then steadies himself with his good hand.

Raphaella takes a deep breath, staring down at the bags on the floor before she turns to him again. “You know that your arm is dead. It’s going to kill you unless I can debride the necrotic flesh which, at this point, is most of the arm. We’ve talked about this.”

He nods.

“Well. Now that I have strong enough drugs on hand, I’m… less worried about you dying from shock,” she continues. “But you are, y’know, septic. Marius, if you don’t let me remove your arm, you’ll be dead by the morning.”

Her words sink in like a stone through water, and if Marius were more lucid, he would sob. He escaped from his own living hell, just to die of infection on a strange spaceship because he’s too stubborn for medical treatment, apparently. “I—I don’t want to die,” he mumbles, nearly choking on the words.

“I know,” she reassures him. “I have… there’s… there’s something else that I could try, but you need to understand what I’m asking of you. I know it’s probably hard for you to think right now, but I need you here with me.”

At least she’s been working on her bedside manner, he figures. “I’m listening.”

Raphaella takes a deep breath and goes to the nearest lab bench, where an oil-stained sheet covers something that apparently showed up overnight. As she cradles the object in her arms and brings it back to him, Marius wonders how it managed to appear without him noticing, not that he notices much in his current state. She sits down again, then pulls back the sheet to show him the skeleton of a metal arm, all delicate pistons and intricate wiring, with a massive socket at one end that leaves what appear to be veins dangling into her lap.

“My wings,” she starts, “are not just… I had wings. Flesh wings. People from my planet have them, and we can fly, and I lost mine as a child. It was… let’s just say that an entire planet built for flighted people doesn’t adapt well to a little kid with no wings. I made it work for me, eventually, but it wasn’t pretty. So when I grew up and learned how to  _ actually  _ bend reality to my will, I made myself some wings.” She says this as casually as if she’s talking about learning to ride a bicycle or pilot a starship. “They’re not just prostheses, though. It’s—I—there’s this scientist, a doctor, and I know  _ very  _ little about her, except for that she found a way to make people immortal. Really, truly immortal.”

Marius swears that his heart stops at those words. “So you…?”

“Yeah. I’ve died… a few hundred times since then, but it never sticks. As far as I can tell, it worked.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying,” he breathes, his arm wobbling as it fights to keep him upright.

Her wings flare behind her in some mixture of anxiety and embarrassment. The more time he spends around her, the more Marius notices that, despite her collected exterior, Raphaella’s wings always give her emotions away. “I haven’t had very much time to work on it,” she admits, stroking the device in her lap. “Honestly, I’m not sure if I can finish it before you die of blood loss or septic shock. And I—I don’t have all my notes and equipment from last time. So I can’t make any promises.”

“I don’t care,” says Marius. “I don’t want to die. I haven’t—I spent my whole fucking life on a planet that wanted to kill me, I lost  _ everything,  _ I’m not ready to die now.”

She frowns. “You need to understand what I’m saying, Marius. If this works—if you’re mechanized—you  _ will not  _ die.” Even from a few feet away, Marius can hear her grinding her jaw. “I can’t begin to explain what that’s like to you. All I know is that I just… I have to keep going. Keep learning, keep moving, keep meeting new people, even if it  _ feels  _ like it’s going to kill me. It hurts, honestly.”

The pain in her eyes pierces through the feverish fuzz in Marius’s head, and he almost reaches out a hand to comfort her before realizing that said hand is, well, dead. “Why are you offering  _ me  _ this? Of all people?”

“You have stories to tell, I think.”

That’s not nearly enough of an explanation for either of them, but the longer Marius studies her face, the more he realizes that she really doesn’t have an answer. “I thought you were going to kill me.”

“I did want to dissect your brain,” she admits, “but a chance to prove my mettle at mechanizing someone else is… bigger.” There’s more that she’s not saying—maybe she’s lonely, maybe she sees some genuine good in him, maybe she just needs a lab assistant she can’t kill. Regardless, Marius can’t even imagine saying no.

“What do I need to do?”

Raphaella spends the next twelve hours in a scientific frenzy, first constructing the rest of the arm and then isolating enough nanobots from her own blood to colonize Marius’s body. The entire time, she’s well aware that Marius’s condition could tank at any moment, but the fear only steadies her hands and sharpens her resolve. In a few days, she might have the time to think about the choice she’s making, and by then it’ll be too late, so for now she just hopes that this won’t backfire too horribly. It’s not like she’s worried about doing the  _ right  _ thing, after all.

The biggest challenge, after talking to Marius about the mechanization process, is coaxing the nanobots into reversing their hormone pathways. They’re remarkably effective when it comes to medical transition, but after centuries of floating around in Raphaella’s bloodstream, these  _ particular  _ ones seem very fond of synthesizing estrogens. By the time she gets that figured out, Marius is clinging to consciousness by a thread.

“I need to get you onto an operating table,” she explains, resting a hand against his forehead to feel just how bad his fever is. “Can you stay with me while I do that?”

Marius nods, watching her with glassy eyes. “You said I have to stay awake.”

“You do. Doesn’t mean you’ll be present, though.”

She lifts him off the bed and carries him to the operating table, remembering once again how fragile he feels in her arms, and then gets to work unraveling the bandages on his wounded arm. It looks horrific, to say the least. Just to give it a minute to air out, she sets up all the restraints that she’ll need to keep him from interfering mid-surgery. With every new strap of leather—one on his forehead, one across his chest, a few on each limb except for the damaged one—Marius tenses.

“Breathe deep for me, okay?” she tells him, as she checks her tray of implements one last time. Everything she needs is there, with the mechanical arm laid out and ready to connect, and the syringe full of nanobot-loaded plasma next to it. “Just remember that this will end, eventually, and you will get through it. Keep telling yourself that.”

Marius looks up at her with a layer of unspoken understanding in his eyes. “Can do. Let’s get going before I die, shall we?”

Gritting her teeth, Raphaella selects a scalpel and starts to cut.

This is  _ very  _ far from her first amputation, so it goes somewhat smoothly, given that her patient is awake and increasingly uncomfortable throughout the procedure. He manages to stay quiet, if twitchy, until she brings out the bone saw, at which point his delirious whimpers turn to screaming sobs. It’s only once she’s removed the necrotic arm entirely and stashed it in a nondescript bag that he starts to come back to himself.

“Still alive,” she reminds him, resisting the urge to brush his hair back with her bloody hands.

Marius draws in a few shaky gasps. “Still alive.”

Installing the mechanism itself is more of a challenge. First, she has to isolate the nerves and vessels that will connect to the mechanical arm—unlike her own mechanism, Marius won’t have a port in his arm, but rather a direct connection between flesh and wire. Once everything is lined up and ready to connect, she takes a moment to study Marius’s face again and then reaches over to grip his good arm. “Marius,” she says, “this is going to hurt  _ very  _ badly. I need you to be ready.”

“Th-the—more than the fucking  _ bone saw?” _

Raphaella presses her lips together. “This is going to hurt so much that it kills you. And then you’ll wake up, eventually, but you need to be prepared.”

He looks at her like a scared animal, like a boy lost in a war zone before he’s really old enough to understand what’s happening to him, but when she laces her bloody fingers with his, the fear on his face hardens. “I can handle it.”

No one can handle it, but she doesn’t say as much.

Instead, she links his nerves to the ends of the mechanism and begins to fuse them, before injecting the nanobot plasma into his arm right above the edge of the wound. Within seconds, Marius’s face starts to spasm, as Raphaella watches his veins stitch themselves together around the ends of the wires and hold fast. “Good,” she says, nudging the metal arm closer. “It’s working. It’s going to be okay.”

Marius responds with a scream.

Lots of people have bled out under Raphaella’s hands, even on this exact table, and she remembers—as much as her human brain will let her—how much it hurt as the mechanism made her body its own. Still, watching Marius wail and convulse, his suffering tickles some fleeting compassion that she didn’t know she had left. She grips the metal arm in one hand and the remains of his flesh one in the other to prevent him from fucking things up while he thrashes, at least until his eyes roll back in his head and he falls limp onto the table.

Even as his human body dies, the mechanism takes hold of him with unrelenting precision, wires and plating meeting eager flesh until Raphaella can no longer see the exact line where one ends and another begins. It takes ten, maybe fifteen minutes, before the metal finally stops warping around itself and goes still; after that, it’s only a matter of seconds before he should wake up.

Raphaella stands over him, still gripping his arm, for thirty minutes. She’s just starting to tip over the edge from frantic worry into genuine panic when the fingers of the metal hand flex, curl, twitch, and then—Marius draws in a horrible, rattling gasp.

_ “Fuck,”  _ Raphaella hisses in relief. She hasn’t dared to speak this entire time, as if she could somehow anger the mechanism by cursing at it, but now she slumps over Marius’s body and ignores the tears stinging at the corners of her eyes. “Fuck, it  _ worked.” _

Marius promptly turns his head to the side and vomits. All at once, every inch of him is shaking, and Raphaella pulls back to assess his condition as the urgency of the situation sharpens her focus again. She strips off the restraints as quickly as she can and helps him sit up so he doesn’t choke, taking in the sickly green pallor of his face and the tremors wracking his body in painful waves. “What the fuck,” he moans, as soon as his voice returns to him. Raphaella isn’t sure whether he sounds different because of the mechanization, or because, she hopes, he’s no longer septic.

“It… worked,” Raphaella replies. “I mean—you were dead for a  _ while,  _ and now you’re alive, so it worked. I did it. Again.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.” The words barely make it out of his mouth before he throws up again, though he still has the courtesy to turn his head away from Raphaella. “Hurts. It— _ everything _ hurts.”

Wracking her memory for details of her own self-mechanization, Raphaella remembers… pain, though she always thought it was more soreness from having all of her cells rewritten than anything more serious. She certainly doesn’t remember feeling as bad as Marius looks. “I—I’m not—I’m sorry,” she responds, surprised at her own honesty. “How do you… feel? Is it just pain, or…?”

“I feel fucking awful.” He coughs a few times, then tries to cover his mouth with a trembling hand. “Can I just g-get back in bed? Please?”

“You’re covered in blood,” Raphaella reminds him. “But now that the surgery’s done, we can get you on some painkillers, and you can just—just sleep it off, yeah? It’ll be alright.”

As soon as he’s adequately doped up, Raphaella sets about cleaning up after herself—surgical implements, the table, the floor, Marius. She is, as always, reminded why normal surgeons use so many sheets and gloves and the like. Marius is out cold by the time she transfers him back to the bed, but he still groans a bit as he settles into the pillow, and Raphaella watches his new mechanism flex each finger as if it has a mind of its own.

For once, she fears that she’s playing with something far outside of her control.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me to myself: yknow you wrote like 3 graphic surgeries last month, you really don't need to go into too much detail here.  
> me:  
> me:  
> me:  
> me: but what if i did tho
> 
> guess what everyone! I finally found something that makes me genuinely ill when reading/writing about it: it's necrosis!! Not that I let that stop me, of course, but it's good to know. In other news, the Marius & Raphaella pre-mechs brainrot has SEIZED me, and since I am no longer beholden to daily fics, I'm going to TRY something... long. Chaptered, even. We'll see how long this lasts, but I've been really excited about it and I have SO MANY IDEAS for the good delicious mutual pining from here on out. And I need, y'know, distractions from the world.
> 
> I am super open to (kind) critique and feedback on this!! I'm very much used to just throwing around dialogue and description and never writing plot at all ever in my life, so I feel like this is kinda weirdly paced (especially at the end where I wanted to spare everyone a detailed amputation scene), but hopefully you all still enjoyed it. Like, as much as possible given the necrosis. Is it wildly ooc for Raphaella to mechanize a random stranger 5 days after meeting him? Perhaps, but that's also longer than people generally live once septic as far as I can tell, so it's a delicate balance of characterization nonsense and medical nonsense. I walk a fine line of bullshit here, folks.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs for this chapter:  
> -drug use (painkillers), character being high  
> -food

Marius sleeps for forty-eight hours after the narcotics kick in, and when he does wake up, Raphaella has to walk him to the bathroom on legs that wobble more than a newborn Plutonian stag. Once he’s safely back in bed, she unwraps the bandages from his arm and studies the join between flesh and mechanism. Compared to the necrotic, infected wound from before, the thick mass of scar tissue at the end of his upper arm seems like a vast improvement.

“Feeling rested?” Raphaella asks as she turns his arm over in her hands. She’d like to wean him off of the painkillers, if only because she doesn’t have many to go around, but she doesn’t want to harass him about his pain level given how awful he felt right after the surgery.

At the moment, he seems too high to be bothered. “I think I could sleep for… a few more years. Can’t really feel anything right now. But this arm is—look at this! Look! It’s  _ attached  _ to me, can you see this?” He waves his mechanism around in front of his face, tracking its movement with wide eyes. “I can’t, like, move the fingers or anything, but I can’t move my  _ other  _ fingers either so that seems okay.”

Raphaella is relieved to see him so cheerful, even if he’s close to passing out again. “I think I’m going to decrease your dosage. Feeling your fingers is important.”

“Mhm!” Marius may or may not be processing a single word coming from her mouth. “I think… um… I think I’m not dead, so that should be okay. Yeah.”

“Alright,” Raphaella manages. “Why don’t you go back to sleep? Maybe when you wake up again, we can get you a shower. Or some food. I’ve still got all that fruit for you, remember?”

He gives her a dopey smile and nestles back under the covers. “Fruit. Hm. Fruit. Yeah.” Before she can respond, he’s asleep, his face suddenly young and soft under his matted hair. Now that he’s not actively dying, it’s easier to see how scrawny he is, how feeble he looks in the harsh light of Raphaella’s lab. It almost makes her feel protective, which she quashes instantly. Just because she immortalized him doesn’t mean that she needs to have  _ feelings  _ about it, after all.

While Marius sleeps, Raphaella combs through the ship and, for once, takes a somewhat detailed inventory of her supplies. Until she started working on his mechanism, she had no intention of keeping him around, so now all of a sudden she needs twice as much of everything. The ship’s kitchen isn’t large enough to call a galley, and the table crammed in one corner is hardly big enough for two, but Raphaella still takes stock of the cabinets as if she’s running a restaurant. How much food do two people even  _ need?  _ Marius is pretty scrawny, and a lot shorter than her, and he doesn’t need enough calories to fly. On the other hand, he could probably use some extra food until he recovers from surgery, at least. As Raphaella debates with herself, she gets to the back of the freezer and notices the last pint of ice cream that she’s been saving for several months, and an idea clicks into place.

After another twelve hours, Marius wakes up semi-lucid and reasonably sore. Raphaella helps him to the bathroom again, and this time she lays out a clean set of clothes for him while he showers, before returning to the lab and stripping the sheets from his cot. Frankly, she’s not sure if Marius has ever had a shower before in his life, but spending several days in bed after surgery is a fresh level of grime even for a street urchin. He could almost be a different person when he gets out of the shower, though he’s already so worn out that he has to lean on Raphaella to get to the kitchen.

“I wasn’t sure why you had so many different kinds of soap, so I just used the one that smelled the best,” he comments, studying the way his metal arm shines in the kitchen light.

Raphaella furrows her brow. “I only have… shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, um… feather conditioner? Please tell me you didn’t slather yourself in the feather conditioner, it’s made for  _ metal.” _

“It was the—the kinda vanilla-y one.”

Alright, so he washed his hair with shower gel. Could be worse. “I’ve got something for you, once you get some food down. How’s your appetite?”

He shrugs. “I don’t  _ feel  _ hungry, but I know I should be.” Guilt washes over his face all of a sudden, and he seems to shrink in his chair. “Do you have enough food for both of us? I know you weren’t—you were planning to, um—I don’t want to be—”

“I have plenty,” Raphaella cuts him off, mentally cataloguing how fast he panics at the mere thought of running out of food. It doesn’t surprise her, but she knows that some habits are harder to break than others. “And if we run out, we land somewhere and stock up. I know I haven’t given you much reason to trust me, but I won’t let you starve.”

“Are you… implying that I  _ didn’t  _ trust you when I let you amputate my arm while I was still awake?”

Raphaella shakes her head as she opens a can of soup and pours it into a saucepan to heat up. “Fair. Maybe not your wisest decision, but you  _ were  _ delirious.”

Once the soup is warm, Raphaella sits down at the tiny table across from Marius and watches him slurp it with increasing enthusiasm. His appetite is a good sign, at least, and he even gestures with his new arm a few times as he yammers through a mouthful of soup. “I had this dream,” he says, “that I was back in my mecha, but it was a moon? Like, I knew it was a moon, but it was still the same shape, it was just kinda floatier and it could shoot moon rocks out of its hands. But then it started sprouting weird flesh tentacles on the inside and I think it ate my brain, and then I woke up.”

“That sounds… intriguing.”

Marius scrapes the last few noodles from the bottom of his bowl and then pushes it toward Raphaella, eyes closed in satisfaction. “That was  _ really  _ good soup. Top ten soups of my life, easily. I—thank you.”

“I haven’t even gotten to the surprise yet,” she reminds him. “You’re gonna want to keep the spoon.”

His eyes go wide, and he watches her every move as she stands and takes his bowl over to the sink, before reaching into the freezer and pulling out the ice cream. Raphaella allows herself a little flourish with her wings as she sets it down on the table in front of him. “What is it?” he asks, poking at the carton. Raphaella has to wonder if refrigeration is a known concept on his home planet.

_ “Gelato,”  _ she replies. “I… don’t remember the word for it in Speutsch. Just try it.”

Marius opens the carton and sticks a finger into the ice cream, apparently perplexed by the texture, before savoring a hefty spoonful. As Raphaella watches, the curiosity on his face transforms into starstruck delight. “Holy  _ fuck,”  _ he breathes.

“I told you,” Raphaella giggles.

Instead of responding, Marius dives into the ice cream at a speed that makes Raphaella worry for his safety, and she has to stop him halfway through the carton, despite his protests. “I’m not gonna get sick,” he argues, reaching for it even as she whisks it back to the freezer and out of his grasp. “I haven’t eaten real food in, like, three days! I have plenty of room for more.”

“That’s not how stomachs work. You can have more later,” she assures him. “How’s the arm feeling?”

She waves his spoon around as she talks, and all of a sudden Marius is frozen, his face a rigid mask of fear and his shoulders hunched to make him look even smaller than he already does. “Fine,” he murmurs.

“Oh, I—ah, fuck, sorry,” Raphaella apologizes. His eyes don’t stop tracking the spoon until she sets it in the sink, then turns back to him and raises her empty hands in apology. “I’m not going to hurt you again. Okay?”

Marius nods, even though every muscle in his body is tense and he looks ready to snap at any second. Unanesthetized surgery, she figures, is enough to condition quite a fear response into a patient, even a willing one; Raphaella resolves not to wield anything shiny and silver at him in the near future, but the damage is done. When she tries to help him up, Marius balks away from her touch and sets off for the lab on his own.

He makes it all of ten steps before his legs buckle under him. “Marius,” she calls, rushing toward him with a single wingbeat and offering a hand while still maintaining as much distance as she can. “You can’t expect yourself to be self-sufficient yet. Can I help you back to bed?”

“I guess,” he grumbles, even as he drags himself to his feet and leans bodily on Raphaella. “‘M sorry. Don’t want to… hurt your feelings, I guess.”

Keeping her exasperation to herself, Raphaella lets her wing rest against his mid-back to stabilize him. “You didn’t. I should’ve been more careful.”

They should talk about this, she thinks, but she doesn’t know how to say ‘sorry for being too callous about the fact that I definitely traumatized you via unprofessional surgery’ in so many words. Given the abrupt change in Marius’s demeanor, he’s not about to say anything, either. Still, when he gets back to bed and realizes that she changed the sheets, he softens a bit.

“I’m sorry I don’t have a real bedroom for you,” Raphaella apologizes as Marius bundles himself into the blankets again. “Not much space to work with on this ship.”

He smirks, though it’s subdued. “‘S fine. The science keeps me company.”

Raphaella has the good grace not to tell him how many objects in this room could kill him at any given time.

If she hadn’t been kicked out of so many universities, Raphaella would have at least a dozen doctorates by now. Unfortunately, none of her hypothetical degrees are in physical therapy, which she casually shares with Marius before she tries to help him gain some control over his mechanized arm.

He’s not sure how much of his weakness is due to the amputation as opposed to years of malnourishment; either way, Marius gets sick of doing repetitive arm raises after a few minutes and starts ribbing Raphaella instead. “So, you had to do this when you got the wings? Just stand around flapping them?”

“Yes, actually. And before that it was just, like, shrugging a lot,” she admits.

He lifts his right arm to the side and rotates it a few times, slowly flexing his metal fingers.  _ “How  _ long do I have to do this?”

“Until I say so.”

Despite his grumbled protests, Marius doesn’t mind the ad-libbed physical therapy too much. Raphaella is an interesting person to be around, especially now that he’s no longer dying of sepsis, and it’s been a  _ very  _ long time since anyone else touched him as gently as she does when she adjusts the positioning of his elbows or presses his shoulders down. Well, there was—he won’t let himself think about it. There were a lot of people back home, whether or not they survived the last few waves of fighting, and if he starts to blame himself for their suffering, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to pull himself back out.

Something hot and angry scratches at his chest as he practices grasping objects with his new hand. Of course, Marius is familiar with anger, with the ways it eats him up from the inside and leaves him red-hot and empty, but this feels different, as if there’s someone else prodding at the back of his head and reminding him just how much he hates the universe. Not for the first time, he wonders what Raphaella actually  _ did  _ to make him immortal, if she’s to be believed.

She catches his arm mid-swing and holds onto his wrist until he returns to reality. “You need to focus on what you’re doing,” she reminds him sternly, even as he pouts up at her. “You’re not going to be happy if you injure yourself on top of everything else.”

“Doubt it’d make a difference at this rate,” he mutters.

“Trust me.” Despite the exasperation in her voice, Raphaella’s hands are soft against his shoulder, rolling it back into place and then positioning his elbow flush against his side. “There. Now just rotate your upper arm so your hand swings out. Yeah, like that.”

Marius winces, because that actually  _ hurts.  _ “Have my shoulders been fucked up this whole time, or is this from the new arm?”

“I have no way of knowing. We can take a break after… give me, say, ten more of those.”

After another ten rotations, Marius is clutching his shoulder with his other hand to try and massage some of the tension out of it, so Raphaella takes pity on him. As they walk back toward the kitchen to get something to eat—Marius steady on his own legs at last—he watches her wings shift idly against her back and wonders how much strength it takes to move them. They’re mostly metal, after all, and they look awfully heavy to him.

“How long can you fly before you get tired?” he asks her over dinner, as she picks through a pile of reheated vegetable slop. “I assume you don’t have hollow bones, and the wings alone must be pretty dense.”

Raphaella smirks and shakes her head. “They’re not the  _ best,  _ aerodynamically speaking, but they don’t rely entirely on my strength. There’s a lot of, uh, machinery in my back that powers them? That probably sounds weird, but. It works.”

“That sounds fucking  _ awesome,”  _ Marius counters. Now that the lingering pain from his surgery is starting to fade, he’s secretly excited about having a mechanical body part. Sometimes. Other times, it terrifies him. “So you’re, like, a legitimate cyborg.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” she laughs.

He shakes his head. “You are, though! Didn’t you say there were nanobots involved? If you’re full of tiny robots, you’re totally a cyborg.” Realization strikes him, and his eyes go wide. “Shit, I have nanobots too, right? We’re  _ both  _ cyborgs.”

Raphaella just shrugs, which Marius takes to mean that he’s right.

Now that Marius is relatively stable, Raphaella finally has the time to commit to rewriting her mechanization notes into something publishable. Of course, she has no intention of actually publishing her work, mostly because she has yet to find a scientific journal in the universe that will accept articles on ‘immortality by way of human sacrifice and/or eldritch nanobot fuckery,’ but it doesn’t hurt to have a manuscript ready to throw around in case the opportunity arises.

Unlike her notes on her own mechanization, the ones regarding Marius are missing… a lot. She doesn’t know what he felt during the surgery, or while he died, or after he woke up, other than pain. And while she may not be the kindest shipmate out there, she’s not keen on retraumatizing him by asking too many invasive questions. So, unlike her previous notes, she focuses on her own methodology, which gives her space to pick apart every potential mistake in her technique, from the way she ligated Marius’s blood vessels before amputation to the fact that she let him shower without some kind of plastic wrap over his arm. By the time she’s done transcribing her methods, her head hurts from grinding her teeth and scowling at the computer screen in frustration.

“You look like you need a break,” Marius calls from his cot on the far side of the lab. He’s propped up against the pillows with a psychology textbook open on his lap and an enormous mug of coffee sitting next to him, on one of the trays usually used for surgical instruments. Coffee, apparently, was unheard of on Marius’s home planet, so she was terrified to see how much more energy he could possibly have; as it turns out, he says it helps him focus. Go figure, Raphaella thinks.

She tips her head toward the ceiling just to feel the ends of her hair brushing against her back, then squints at him out of the corner of her eye. “Science doesn’t take breaks.”

“Yeah, but scient _ ists  _ do.” He puts the book down, takes a massive swig of coffee, and then gets to his feet with a groan before coming to stand behind her chair, his hands resting on her shoulders with a hesitance that doesn’t show in his voice. “At least work on something—ooh, wait, are you writing a paper about me?”

It’s too late to close the window on the screen in front of her. “Um. Yes. Just, uh, typing up my notes.”

“Patient MvR… oh, really? My initials aren’t exactly anonymous. That’s a breach of patient confidentiality right there, at least according to what I’ve been reading.”

“Psychologists don’t know what they’re talking about,” Raphaella grumbles. “Regardless, it’s not like this’ll ever be published. My work tends to be too, uh, avant-garde for most reputable publications.”

Marius leans over her shoulder to read one of her footnotes, narrowly dodging a wing to the face. “There aren’t evil unethical science journals out there?”

“They never last,” she sighs. “Or they end up being predatory scams. As if a lack of scientific ethics justifies a lack of  _ business  _ ethics.”

He’s too busy reading over her shoulder to actually listen to her, until he suddenly stands up straight and starts bouncing on his heels. “We should make one! Your colleagues out there in the cosmos must be dying for some good old-fashioned peer review, and it can’t be _that_ hard to get a publication set up, right? We need a name. Something really nefarious-sounding, like—like—”

“You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, do you?” Raphaella bites back a laugh as she swivels in her chair to face him.

“Okay, so  _ maybe  _ I’m new to the scientific method, but there’s no better place to learn!” He nearly knocks a beaker off the table behind himself as he throws his arms wide. At least he’s unencumbered by the new arm. “Besides, we both know I’m mostly here to be your sounding board. As in, you tell me ideas and I just smile and nod.”

He’s proving to be a quick learner, as naive as he is, and Raphaella’s grateful for that. In the two weeks since she made the impulsive choice to pluck him from the rubble of his homeworld, he’s already shown a lot of promise as a lab assistant, even if he’s still too weary to stand around and help for that long. So she can keep telling herself that she only had the one reason for saving him. “You’re going to need more background knowledge to run a journal. Go back to your book.”

When he grumbles and slouches back to his cot, Raphaella ignores the way her shoulders feel suddenly cold without his presence hovering behind her.

Marius wakes from a dream he can’t remember to the sound of distant music floating through the ship. It’s not an instrument he recognizes, though there weren’t many to go around back home; the sound is clear, ringing, almost sharp at times, and he’s out of bed and tracking it down before he can process what he’s hearing.

As he shuffles through the halls of the ship, Raphaella’s voice joins the unknown instrument. He’s never heard her sing before, though he’s not sure how he never thought to imagine what it would sound like now that he’s hearing the amber-smooth honey of her voice on a melody he doesn’t know. For a moment, he stops and leans against the wall, eyes closed and breath shaky.

It’s incredible to hear  _ music  _ again.

At the end of the hallway, he realizes that he’s outside her room, and he stops short before he can barge in. He’s never seen the inside of Raphaella’s room before, and it feels like a threshold they haven’t passed yet, not that their friendship has conformed to any semblance of normalcy. Raphaella is the only person in the universe who he even  _ knows  _ anymore, but it still feels odd to call her a friend. Even after she immortalized him with her own literal sweat and blood.

Before he can decide whether to make his presence known, the music pauses and, moments later, Raphaella’s face appears in her doorway. Her hair falls over her shoulder and catches the light in a flaxen wave. “D’you need something?”

“I, um. Sorry, didn’t mean to bother you,” Marius apologizes.

Raphaella just smiles at him, before opening the door wide and beckoning him into the room. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“You didn’t,” he says hastily. “I was—I had a dream or something, I don’t know. I just, uh, I—I liked—your singing is. Really nice.”

“Thank you,” she responds, beaming up at him as she sits down in front of a machine that Marius has never seen. It’s a long black rectangle, with smaller black and white rectangles across the top and a bunch of tiny buttons on the far side. When Raphaella’s fingers dance across it, a soft melody emerges. “Have… you seen a keyboard before?”

Of course his face gives him away. “Nope. I had a violin, but this—this thing looks kinda fragile for, y’know, an active war zone.”

She shrugs. “Fair. Violin, though—you play?”

“I did,” Marius mumbles.

As she begins to play again, something warm and melancholy curls up in Marius’s chest. “I’m sure we could find you another one,” Raphaella offers.

Marius opens his mouth to brush her off, because it shouldn’t be important. Out of all the things from his home that he could’ve saved, his violin should be the least of his worries. But for once in his life, he can’t force himself to lie. Instead, he flounders for a moment before nodding slowly and staring down at the floor.

As if to comfort him, Raphaella starts to sing.

The song is something slow, almost mournful, and the words hardly make any sense to Marius, but he leans on the edge of her desk (for science that overflows from the lab, presumably) and listens anyway. The lyrics ache with tragedy and self-sacrifice, so hopeless that it pierces him to the bone; with her focus entirely on the keyboard, Raphaella’s back is to him. Every tinge of vibrato in her voice echoes through her wings, fluttering and flexing with emotion.

Marius is experiencing some emotions that he’s not yet ready to process.

More pressing is the stubborn lump in his throat, which started to form when she asked him about the violin and only continues to grow as she sings. There’s a section of the song that feels empty, almost desolate, and he imagines the way his strings could float under her voice and bolster her to the final few notes. Her range is incredible. When she finishes the song, head bowed and wings folded tight against her back, Marius realizes that he’s crying.

He scrubs the tears from his face, startled by his own emotions, but it’s too late to hide them. Raphaella turns away from the keyboard and gets an eyeful of him slumped against her desk, shoulders hunched and face wet, and she cocks her head to the side like a sympathetic dove.

“Are you alright?”

Avoiding her eyes, Marius stares instead at the stack of biochemistry journals next to her unmade bed. “Y-yeah. That song is just. Um. Intense.”

Raphaella smiles, sadder now than before. “Have to get it out of my system sometimes. Can I hug you?”

“Uh,” is all Marius can manage as the gears in his brain grind to a halt. She’s opening her arms, and her  _ wings,  _ making heat rise to the tips of his ears. “Um. Sure. Yeah.”

She crosses the room in two steps and sweeps him into a hug, one hand on the back of his head to hold him close to her chest. She hums as she holds him, until Marius can no longer bite back his sobs. “I—I’m sorry,” he mumbles into her shoulder, which is already wet from tears, but she just squeezes him tighter. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” When it’s clear that her arms aren’t enough to soothe him, she wraps her wings around him too. The delicate metal of her feathers is warmer than he expected, and flexible enough to hold him tight against her. She feels solid, as if her embrace is an unspoken promise that she will keep him steady through the roiling terror in his mind.

For what might be the first time in his life, Marius feels safe.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Raphaella offers awkwardly.

What is there to say? He doesn’t want to admit that he feels safer in an immortal mad scientist’s spaceship—no, her  _ bedroom _ —than anywhere else. But her hair falls over her shoulder and tickles the side of his face as he leans into her, which makes it that much harder to keep himself quiet. “I just,” he starts, before stopping to clear his throat. “I… I don’t know. I really missed music. My violin was—it—before we found the mecha, it was the only thing that was  _ mine,  _ and now it’s gone. I don’t have anything. And I’m not there anymore, I’m  _ safe  _ here, at least until you decide to dissect my brain, but I still… I feel like… I—I don’t—I have nothing that’s  _ mine.  _ I don’t want to be, like, ungrateful, since you—”

“You’re not,” she interrupts him. “And I, um, I’ve gotten kinda fond of you. Or your company, at least. I won’t dissect your brain without consent.”

“How merciful of you,” Marius deadpans through his tears. Her wings rustle against his back. “I-I’m glad you—I—not a lot of people back home, um, liked me? Y’know. Should’ve been the least of my worries, with all the bombs and guns and starvation and all that, but also things would’ve been a  _ lot  _ better if I didn’t annoy everyone in a mile radius around me.”

Raphaella frowns, rubbing his back with one hand. “Annoy? I find you to be quite charismatic, if I’m being honest.”

“Yeah. Well. I try to be.”

They stay there for a few minutes, long enough that Marius has to wonder how many years Raphaella has gone without hugging another person, though he isn’t complaining. She’s warm, and she smells like smoke in a way that could almost be from a cozy bonfire rather than a lab accident or twelve, and her voice in his ear reminds him that, for once, he’s not alone.

Eventually, he’s too tired to stand around any longer, so he squeezes her once and then worms out from within her wings. “I’m about to pass out,” he mumbles as he turns to leave her room.

“Wait, Marius—if, um. If you ever need a hug, just say so, okay?”

He’s too tired to smile, but he would if he could. “Yeah. I will.” It’s no surprise that she’s so touch-starved, and he’s not one to complain, especially since she’s so… well, he won’t go down that road in the middle of the night.

From then on, Raphaella is a bit more generous with her affection—draping a wing around Marius’s shoulders as they sit near each other to read; resting her head on his shoulder as she waits for coffee to brew in the mornings; massaging the remnants of his right arm even once he’s able to use his mechanism with more dexterity than he ever had in his flesh hand. His physical therapy continues to be mind-numbing, at least until Raphaella lays him down on an exam table and starts to work the knots out of his shoulder with hands firm enough to make him cry.

A month after she rescued him, he finally realizes that she wasn’t just in the right place at the right time. Sometimes he thinks that he’d feel this way about anyone, if he had no one else in the universe, but then she looks up from one of her chicken-scratch notebooks and beams at him, and for every moment that he’s caught in her deep blue eyes, he knows that her presence is more than serendipitous.

He doesn’t deserve it, but he’s not a good enough person to care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: I have an idea for a Chaptered fic. I have ideas for Many Chapters.  
> me: ...I have written one chapter. Where are my ideas.
> 
> Obviously I DO have ideas, this is just the issue I run into every time XD I say slow burn but I want kisses! I want kisses and smooches so badly! Anyway, imagine getting a wing hug from Raph for the first time. like. holy shit. also guess what song Raph is singing ;3c if you've talked to me for more than 5 minutes, you can Probably guess lol.
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed this, and you're all ready for the pining to ramp up over the next chapter or so >:3 leave a comment! pls!!! I start my new job tomorrow so I need the moral support!!!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs for this chapter:  
> -temporary main character death  
> -canon-typical murder, violence, and crimes  
> -blood/injury  
> -poisoning  
> -frank discussions of trauma

This will be Marius’s first time on a new planet. He can’t stop pacing, waving his metal arm around wildly as he talks about everything and nothing, while Raphaella just leans against the wall and tries to hide her smile. There’s something about his enthusiasm that gets to her, burrows down into her bones and settles there, warm and patient.

She doesn’t usually revisit places she’s already been, but she wanted something familiar this time, just to make sure that they won’t be murdered in a dozen horrific ways before they can make it back to the ship. That happens sometimes. It’s titillating for her, but Marius has only died the one time, and she’d like to hold off on him suffering through it again.

When the ship finally touches down and starts to depressurize, Marius stops in his tracks, looking queasy. “Why is the air heavy all of a sudden?”

“Pressure change,” Raphaella explains. “Sit down if you need to, okay?”

He sways a bit on his feet, but stays standing out of sheer defiance if nothing else.

Eventually, the hatch chimes, indicating that the landing ramp is deployed and ready to let them off the ship. Raphaella takes the lead. Outside, the watery light of two suns illuminates calm cobblestone streets and slender trees covered in thorns. Though she chose a landing pad in a residential area to avoid throwing Marius into too much chaos, Raphaella follows the distant music on the wind until they turn the corner into a market square.

She looks back to Marius and finds him wide-eyed and smiling uncontrollably. “I have a currency converter,” she reminds him. It’s more of a forger, but he doesn’t need to know that. “Go wild.”

Without waiting for further encouragement, Marius takes off into the crowd, until all Raphaella can see of him is the occasional flash of metal or curly brown hair. She tries to keep an eye on him—she doubts he’s ever seen so many people in one place who weren’t trying to kill him, after all—but there are more pressing matters at hand, especially when the owner of the local apothecary recognizes her and starts furiously peddling every corrosive material they have to offer.

Since money is no object, she stocks up on all the chemicals that can fit in her lab, taking them back to the ship in cartfuls while Marius cavorts around the square to his heart’s content. Lab space is running low now that he’s a more permanent resident, but that only encourages Raphaella to fine-tune her organization. Once the lab is overflowing with supplies, she starts shopping for food instead, trusting that Marius is still too distracted by things like candy and owning several distinct outfits to join her.

By the time she’s done, Raphaella starts to worry if the ship will be too overburdened to take off. Logically, she knows it’d take a lot more than food to accomplish that, but she didn’t bother to calculate the gravity on this planet, either. She finds Marius arguing with the owner of a flower stall who clearly doesn’t speak a word of Speutsch, at which point she realizes that she never thought to warn Marius of potential language barriers. “Hey,” she calls, resting a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. “How’s it going? Not picking too many fights, I hope?”

“I—I didn’t think—you speak the same language as me, so I never thought…” He cuts off in frustration, then bonks his head into her shoulder. Raphaella can’t keep her wings from flaring behind her. “Sorry. Not trying to get into trouble.”

Instead of answering him, Raphaella turns to the vendor and offers a few words in New Old Martian, which she heard from a few people around the square. He just stares at her, quizzical, and then responds in Spitaliano: “I know you. You’re that scientist, right?”

No matter how hard she tries to stifle it, her heart swells at the sound of her native tongue. “I am  _ that scientist,  _ as a matter of fact. I apologize for my companion, he’s—”

“You’re that scientist who always pays in counterfeit bullshit.”

Raphaella freezes, face stony and arm rigid on Marius’s shoulder. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” the vendor hisses. “I thought there must’ve been a mistake, last time, but I got a message from the apothecary just now saying you stiffed them. Counterfeit coins. You really thought you could pull one over on us like that?”

There goes any chance of Marius having a peaceful first time planetside, she figures.

The florist is already stepping out from behind his stall, staring Raphaella down as if he has any hope of making it out of this altercation alive, and she grabs Marius’s elbow to shove him behind herself. “You really don’t want to do that,” she informs the vendor.

He just takes a swing at her.

Raphaella ducks under the punch and drives her elbow into the man’s solar plexus, making him crumple with a horrible wheeze. Despite her efficiency, there’s really no way to get into a fistfight without making a scene, and she turns around to see that a few other vendors have recognized her as well, and several are reaching for weapons. “Fuck,” she whispers, tugging on Marius’s elbow. “I hope you have everything you need, because we’re getting out of here.”

“Already? I can take a few of ‘em, I’ve got this metal hand and all—”

Before he can finish his sentence, a gunshot goes off. Next to the flower stall, a woman who had been selling bags of rice until moments before holds a literal smoking gun, the kind with bullets and powder and all, and time slows down around Raphaella. She feels her wings spread behind her, each feather catching the sunlight and reflecting it so that every hapless market-goer around her is suddenly ensnared by her wrath.

Behind her, on the ground, Marius coughs as he bleeds out.

Raphaella’s anger has always been cold and calculated, a scalpel to wield at those who would turn her away. When Marius dies, though, she feels genuine white-hot rage boiling up her throat for the first time in her long life, and if she had the presence of mind to be scared, she might. Instead, she unsheathes the dagger usually hidden by the shadow of her wings and lunges at the woman who shot Marius.

She only ends up killing a half-dozen people before the crowd descends into chaos, at which point she stays her own hand and fights desperately to calm herself down. A little wanton murder is not unusual for her, but all of a sudden it feels out of her control, like her fury has taken hold of her by the throat and used her as a weapon. As she forces herself through some breathing exercises, she kneels next to Marius and checks for a pulse; he’s definitely dead. For the moment.

Thankfully, every civilian dumb enough to wave a gun at her has changed their mind after seeing her gut a few people, so she’s able to scoop Marius into her arms and walk away from the plaza unscathed, save the blood splattered all over her clothes and wings. He starts to stir again before they’re halfway to the ship. “Wh… fuck… hng?” he groans, patting her face with one flailing hand.

“It’s okay. Just hang in there,” she murmurs, spreading her wings to hasten her walking just a bit. “We’re almost home.”

That’s when she realizes that someone is following them. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices a shadow sprinting from one house to the next, always too far behind her to get a good look, and even though she knows nothing on this planet poses any real threat, her heart races in her throat. She doesn’t want to put Marius down, especially because panic is dawning on his face as he starts to wake up in earnest. Right now, he’s her priority, and she really doesn’t want to lose control of her anger again.

Their pursuer never shows their face. But as Raphaella jogs up the landing ramp and onto her ship, barely keeping a hold on a wriggling Marius, she feels something wickedly sharp pierce her back, wedging between two ribs and likely puncturing a lung. They have fantastic aim, then, or else they’re just really lucky; either way, Raphaella sets Marius down as soon as the door closes behind them, and then coughs even more blood into her elbow.

“What the  _ fuck  _ happened,” Marius groans from the floor.

Raphaella leans against the wall for a moment, waiting for her mechanism to patch the hole in her lung so that the haze of pain will stop clouding her eyes. It doesn’t happen. “You got shot. Then you got better.”

Once she can see enough to make out his silhouette, Marius is dragging himself to his feet and reaching out for her hand. “Shit. I… let’s just get off this planet. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Of course.” She’s lying.

Marius has never seen Raphaella so obviously in pain, even if she won’t admit it, and he follows her to the front of the ship as closely as he can without getting smacked by a wing. There’s a wicked-looking knife poking out from her back. Apparently, she’s elected to ignore it for the time being, because she just flinches away from him when he tries to reach out and grab it. She’s wounded in other places too—he can’t tell how much of the blood covering her body is her own, but her rattling breaths give him a decent picture. Once they reach the bridge, she plugs a path into the autopilot and then slumps over the controls, head in her hands.

“Alright, you’re—you’re clearly  _ not  _ okay,” he points out. There’s a measly first aid kit hanging up next to the control panel, which has probably been there since before Raphaella owned the ship, given that she’s had no use for it. “I thought you said your mechanism healed you on its own.”

Pain flickers across her face like a lightning strike. She gets hurt all the time—lab accidents and play-fights and that game where you stab between your fingers with a knife really fast—but the tension in the room is different now in a way that makes Marius queasy. “I thought so, too,” she admits.

He pulls a handful of gauze, a few bandages, and some antiseptic swabs out of the first aid kit. “Is it because that knife is still sticking out of your fucking back, or…?”

“I think there’s something on it.” She tries to reach behind herself, then hisses when the knife tugs at her skin. “Poisoned fucking daggers. Who do these people think they  _ are?” _

Marius has to wonder how much adrenaline she’s running on at the moment, given that she doesn’t seem to have noticed any of the other scrapes and bruises she incurred in the fight. “Works better on us than regular weapons, apparently.”

Just then, Raphaella finally gets her hand around the hilt of the knife and rips it out of her back, which only leaves her bleeding and wheezing harder. “I—I’m not sure I’m going to be conscious much longer,” she admits.

“I’ve got you,” Marius suggests, stepping closer to her and reaching out to spot her in case she passes out on the spot.

Instead, she tucks her wings in close to her body and strips her shirt off, her back still to him. She leans on the pilot’s chair to keep herself upright, and as her wings flex and flutter with nervous energy, Marius is entranced by the subtle movements of the muscles in her back. Thick ridges of scar tissue surround the ports connecting her wings to her torso. Marius has spent quite a bit of time thinking about how strong she must be to carry the massive metal appendages around, but seeing her sheer power in action is enough to render him speechless.

He’s overwhelmed by the urge to lean into her and feel the way those muscles shift under his palms, to kiss the gentle dip of her spine and hold her until she can heal on her own. It’s not the first time he’s had more-than-friendly thoughts about her, by any means, but they’re not usually so vivid, and now is  _ not  _ the time. “Can I patch you up?” he asks, shaking off the mental image.

“Please,” Raphaella croaks.

Now that he actually needs to use his hands, Marius has no idea where to put them. After a few seconds of useless hovering, he tears open one of the antiseptic swabs and starts cleaning the knife wound, holding Raphaella’s shoulder in place as she winces away from the sting. If the knife actually  _ is  _ poisoned, he hopes that her mechanism can take care of it, because he has no idea how to go about extracting it from an open wound. So he just hopes for the best and bandages it as well as he can, feeling Raphaella’s shoulders go slack as he works.

Once the stab wound is taken care of, she turns around and leans back against the dashboard. “Thanks,” she slurs, “I think I’m… gonna go sleep this off—”

“Not yet,” Marius interrupts. “You’re all banged up from fighting all those people, Raph. Let me take care of you.”

She’s barely present enough to nod, but her eyes soften a bit when Marius starts cleaning up the blood staining her face. He holds her chin with one hand, as delicate as he can, and dabs at her lips with a piece of gauze until he’s certain that they’re not busted. All the blood came from  _ in  _ her mouth, then. Just as he finishes up and starts to move toward her forehead, where her hair is stuck to her skin with cold sweat, she rests a gentle hand on his wrist to hold it in place and kisses his fingertips.

Marius forgets how to breathe.

By the time he remembers how to move his eyes, Raphaella is already slouching into his arms, unconscious. “Fuck. Shit,” Marius yelps as he attempts to catch her, which doesn’t go well, given that he’s several inches shorter than her. But he’s nothing if not stubborn, so after a few attempts he manages to pick her up and shuffle off toward her room, ignoring the sound of her wingtips dragging against the ground.

She whines a bit when he deposits her on her bed, but otherwise seems content to sleep off the worst of the poison in peace, so Marius leaves her there. At least while she’s out, he has a bit of time to deal with his current emotional crisis.

Raphaella’s bed has never been this comfortable. She often struggles to get out of bed, which is one of the reasons why she almost never sleeps, but this is something different entirely; her body aches to the bone, she’s too tired to move, and she wishes that she could roll over just to wrap herself even tighter in the blankets and feel  _ embraced. _

It occurs to her, as she soaks in the warmth of her pillow, that she  _ could  _ be embraced. There’s another person on this ship, right? Another… immortal, someone she  _ made,  _ someone who—Marius. His name is Marius. He could ostensibly hold her, and she wants that so badly that she shivers, which only makes the ache worse. Why does she hurt so much? Scanning her memories, she starts to piece things together, from mechanizing Marius to taking him planetside to fighting with random salespeople over her forged coins. They shot Marius, she remembers, and she killed a few of them. Not enough. She curls around herself and bites her lip to keep from sobbing as she feels the terror of watching him die all over again.

In all honesty, she’d hoped to wait a few more years before actually testing his immortality.

Still, she knows he’s alright, because she carried him back and he woke up and he—this is where things get fuzzy, Raphaella realizes. Pain radiates from her ribs, reminding her that she was definitely stabbed, and she thinks that Marius must’ve patched her up, because she’s suddenly accosted by the memory of his hands on her back and then her _face_ and he was so tender and gentle and kind and she might’ve kissed his fingers which was _definitely_ weird and—

Raphaella forces herself to take a deep breath, even though it hurts. She does weird things sometimes. Marius must be aware of this, since he lives with her and tolerates her well enough, so hopefully she won’t have scared him off with her delirious affection. That doesn’t stop her heart from pounding in her throat from fear that he’s going to abandon her already.

At last, she manages to roll over and get her arms under herself. As she sits up in bed, she realizes that she’s shirtless, and that she has no idea how she got  _ into  _ bed in the first place, since the last thing that she remembers is standing on the bridge with Marius’s hands tenderly holding her face. Wait, yes, she took her shirt off because of the fucking stab wound, which was fucking  _ stupid  _ of her! What if she made him uncomfortable? He didn’t react all that much, as far as she can remember, but she was barely conscious. Given that she’s performed fucking  _ surgery  _ on him, she really shouldn’t be so embarrassed by the mere concept of him seeing her boobs, and yet. Raphaella isn’t all that modest in most circumstances, though, so why—

Oh.

The last of her memories trickle back into place, ending with the feeling of his fingers on her lips and the rich darkness of his eyes fixed on her face, and her heart races as she imagines how he must’ve carried her to bed. Something sharp and painful in her chest  _ aches  _ to know what it’s like to be held like that, to be cared for by him. All at once, she’s overwhelmed by the certainty that she loves him. She’s only known him for a month, which is nothing compared to the vast sprawl of her life thus far, but she loves him more than she’s ever been able to love any mortal human.

At the moment, she just wants to see him again. Mostly to be sure that she hasn’t scared him away, though he’s nice to look at as well. But when she finally manages to throw the covers off and stand on wobbly legs, she realizes that she’s still covered in blood, as is her bed. She’ll probably have to autoclave her fucking sheets again. So a shower comes first, and  _ then  _ she can track Marius down and restrain herself from curling up in his lap like a needy cat.

The hot water helps the ache in her bones, thankfully, so by the time she’s clean and dressed, she feels well enough to wander the ship as long as she leans on the walls. She has to hope that the pain has to do with the poison, because she’s never had so much trouble recovering from an injury before. Well, unless she’s murdered in a  _ truly  _ gruesome way, but sometimes that can also kick-stark the nanobots into healing her faster.

Before she can decide where to start looking for Marius, she hears a surprised yelp from the lab, followed by the sound of glass shattering. Maybe she should be frustrated that he’s breaking things, but Raphaella can’t help but smile at the sound of his voice.  _ Fuck,  _ she’s got it bad. “What are you breaking in here?” she asks as she limps into the room, leaning heavily on the doorframe.

“Nothing,” he answers, faster than he should even be able to get the word out of his mouth. “Nothing! Don’t worry about—oh, wait, you’re up already?”

Raphaella grins at him, then heads for his cot and sits down on the edge, because she’s already too tired to stay on her feet. “Why? Hoping to get a break from me?”

He frowns and bends down to pick up the pieces of the shattered beaker on the floor. At least he has the common sense to use his metal hand. “I was worried about you, actually. I was—well, I. Um. I was trying to do some science ‘cause I knew it’d summon you somehow, but I’m just breaking things.”

“By ‘science,’ do you just mean ‘pouring random liquids into beakers until something explodes?’”

Marius presses his lips together, tosses the beaker shards into the trash, and avoids her eyes as he rinses the mystery chemicals off his hands. “I don’t have to answer that.”

“Sure,” Raphaella laughs. He’s  _ adorable  _ when he’s pouting at her. But when he actually looks up at her, the embarrassment returns, catching hot and thick in her throat. “Oh, uh. Thanks for… helping me out, I guess.”

“Least I can do, since you  _ did  _ carry me back to the ship. You look much better now that you’re not covered in blood,” he adds.

His footsteps are uncharacteristically soft as he strides over to her, then sits down at the head of the cot, leaning against the pillows. It takes all of Raphaella’s wavering self-control to keep from diving headfirst into his chest, but then he holds out an arm and beckons her to him, and she sways into his side as if he’s a magnet.

She  _ really  _ likes magnets.

“My bones hurt,” she grumbles as Marius scoots to the side to make more room for her. Her wet hair falls over her shoulder and soaks through his shirt, but he doesn’t seem to care. “Fucking poison, I guess. It doesn’t usually take me this long to get better.”

“I didn’t feel that bad after coming back, so your handiwork was effective, I guess? If it makes you feel any better.”

Now she wants to experiment on him, which doesn’t help anything. As she’s learned, most people  _ don’t  _ see scientific tests as flirting, especially when those tests include repeated murder. “I’m glad,” she admits. “I’d be really upset if you kicked the bucket on me, to be honest.”

“Me too,” mumbles Marius.

Raphaella has enough self-awareness to know that she was deliriously lonely before meeting him. So, logically, the chance that he’s actually something  _ special  _ is slim to none, but how could the man rubbing her shoulder and leaning his head on hers be anything short of a miracle? Not only did he appear when she was in desperate need of a companion—whether she admitted it to herself or not—but he’s already seen so much of her, maybe not her  _ worst  _ but close, and still he goes out of his way to care for her.

“Did I make you uncomfortable?” she asks, staring firmly at the wall instead of trying to decipher his facial expression.

His chest vibrates under her as he hums. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“I—okay, look, getting stabbed was no excuse to take my clothes off and—I don’t remember what else, I was stabbed.”

“I beg to differ.” The hand rubbing her shoulder stops and squeezes it instead, pulling her even closer to his side. “Kinda hard to treat wounds like that with clothes in the way. Did—wait, are you forgetting that I also have tits, or…?”

She huffs and goes to cross her arms, only to realize that one of them is pinned between their bodies. “It’s different. Men’s tits.”

Marius holds her tight as he dissolves into laughter, and Raphaella  _ really  _ hopes that he doesn’t notice her face going bright red. “Men’s tits. That does kinda make me feel better about them existing, honestly.”

“Offer still stands,” Raphaella reminds him. “I’ll chop ‘em off any time. Especially now that you’re more or less recovered from mechanization.”

“I’m still deciding how to feel about them. Hell, maybe I should start walking around shirtless just to see what it’s like,” he muses, stroking Raphaella’s hair thoughtfully.

If he does that, she  _ will  _ combust, but she can’t tell him that in so many words. “I might be able to program something into the nanobots, even,” she adds. Hypothetical science can distract her for at least a moment.

“How did I  _ ever  _ survive living with cis people?”

Raphaella just kicks his foot a few times, because she has no idea how to express her affection without smothering him. “Beats me.”

They lie there for a few hours, chattering about nothing and soaking up each other’s warmth, while Raphaella recovers from the poison and Marius distracts her from the random pain in her bones. She’s close to falling asleep next to him when the beaker he threw in the trash does what random beakers of mystery liquid are wont to do, and explodes.

Marius jumps so hard that he nearly knocks her off the cot, his legs flailing and his breath coming in strained gasps, while Raphaella groans and drags herself out of bed. “This is why we  _ clean up _ after our scientific mishaps,” she reminds him as she heads for the trash can to examine the wreckage. Purple smoke billows out of the trash, filling the lab with a smell reminiscent of sweet lavender. “What even went into this?”

There’s no answer from the cot. After poking around the broken beaker for a moment, Raphaella turns to look at him, and finds Marius clutching his chest and trembling, eyes closed. “Oh. Um,” she mumbles, speed-walking back toward him. “Fuck. I—I thought you were messing around, I’m sorry, are you alright? Fuck, Marius, I’m sorry—”

“I’m fine,” he snaps. Then he looks up at her and softens a bit, though his lip trembles as he reaches out with one hesitant hand to interlace his fingers with Raphaella’s. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to yell at you. I’m—I—dunno why that scared me so bad.”

Moving slowly enough to let him lean away if he wants to, Raphaella sits down on the cot again and stays still and rigid until Marius leans into her side. “It’s… well, it can be, um. That’s pretty common for trauma survivors, to startle easily? I’m surprised you didn’t get to that part in your psych textbook.”

His eyes go in and out of focus as he, apparently, makes the connection. “Oh. Yeah, I guess.”

“If you try to tell me that growing up in a fucking war zone somehow doesn’t count as trauma, I  _ will  _ scream,” Raphaella informs him.

Marius squeezes her hand and shakes his head, hair brushing her neck. It takes everything in her to suppress a shiver. “No, I know. I just—I guess I convince myself that I’m fine? If I can be funny and stupid and worth keeping around, then I should be fine.” His voice cracks, and Raphaella feels his vulnerability like a fragile creature curling up on her chest, like something that she wants to protect more than anything.

“You don’t have to be,” she says. “Not with me. I’m not going to stop—I’ll still want you here. No matter how many real human emotions you have.”

She’s told him that before, in other moments of weakness, but it never hurts to keep saying it. And she always means it, of course, but given some of the things she’s realized today, it holds more weight than he knows.

“I don’t know where I’d be without you,” Marius mumbles into her shoulder.

Raphaella laughs. “You’d be dead. Obviously.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been sitting on the "marius tenderly caring for raph while also losing it about her SHREDDED back" since the get-go so I am delighted to share it with you all >:3c and then I struggled to fill out this chapter, because I have the brainpower of a nematode. I'm sure I wanted to say more here, but I can barely form a sentence atm.
> 
> In other news! I started my new job and it's been fantastic! I REALLY missed doing science, as it turns out, and I feel SO MUCH BETTER than I did when suffering through late-night retail lol. On the other hand, working full-time is a Lot, so writing is more of a challenge! I was trying to do NaNo or at least get close to 50k this month, but it's probably not gonna happen. REGARDLESS I have been writing every day and I'm working on A Lot of things atm, mostly this fic but others too! This is hopefully gonna be 6-7 chapters in the end, for reference.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. I thrive on your comments and I love you all!!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> -nightmares  
> -disordered eating/hoarding food

“I need you to be prepared next time,” Raphaella insists. “Things could’ve gone a lot worse, depending on the planet, and I don’t want you to—you shouldn’t have to deal with getting murdered every time we go planetside, is all.”

Marius presses his fingertip to the edge of the knife she just presented to him. “I’m not complaining about the knife, trust me. But I’m a bit insulted that you think I can’t fight. Just ‘cause I got shot—”

“Marius,” she cuts him off. “That’s not what I’m saying. I know you wouldn’t have made it this far if you couldn’t hold your own, but it doesn’t hurt to brush up on your skills. Consider it part of your physical therapy.”

“I thought I was done with that,” he groans, but he still follows her across the ship. On the far side of the lab, next to the trash chute, is a tiny home—or, well, space—gym, equipped with a punching bag, a few dumbbells, and a spin bike that looks like it has never been used. In fact, most of it looks completely unused, except for the handful of times that she dragged him in here for physical therapy. This time, Raphaella shoves all the equipment to the side of the room and then shrugs off her sweater, leaving her in a tank top that’s loose enough for her wings to easily poke out of the arm holes.

This could easily be the death of Marius von Raum.

“Put the knife down for now,” she instructs him. “We can practice with weapons later. I just want to see what you can do first.”

She starts swinging her arms in wide circles, her wings working behind her as if they need their own warmup, and Marius muses that he might not survive this interaction. “I’ll fuckin’ show you,” he grumbles under his breath, which just makes Raphaella raise her eyebrows and laugh at him.

“Sure. Just stretch first, I don’t want to hurt you  _ too  _ badly.”

Staring at the floor to keep his balance, Marius starts stretching his legs the way Raphaella had shown him, then cracks his neck just to intimidate her. He knows it’ll never work, but it’s worth a shot. “How are we doing this, then?”

“Like this,” she replies, seconds before she barrels into him head-on and knocks him to the ground.

Marius is just shocked for a moment, because he’s somehow enough of an idiot not to expect this, before Raphaella attempts to get him in a headlock and he starts to flail violently in her grip. One of her thighs hooks around his midriff, pinning him in place as if her flying ability wasn’t enough to prove her strength. “I thought you  _ didn’t  _ want to hurt me,” he wheezes.

Her elbow slams down in the center of his back. “Too badly, I said. You’ll get better.”

“Bullshit.” Luckily, Marius is used to being the scrappy underdog in fights like this, so instinct carries him as he drives his own elbow sideways into Raphaella’s stomach. She coughs dramatically but doesn’t let go of him, at least until he throws his head back to smack into her chin and hears the uncomfortable  _ clack _ of her teeth clenching. That gives him time to roll over and out of her grasp. “Nice try. I’ve seen worse, though.”

Raphaella rises up onto her knees, spreading her wings out for balance. “Then show me.”

Just to mess with her, Marius feints a few times, right-left-right, then dives to her right and rolls dramatically under her outstretched wing, narrowly avoiding the arm that swipes at him. Once behind her, he snakes an arm around her waist and pulls her back until she starts to tip—and then her wings brace against the ground, and Marius is just hanging from her back at a wildly uncomfortable angle while she snickers at him. Before she can get too satisfied with herself, he strikes out with one leg and pushes off from the floor, shoving her face-first onto the mat as his momentum helps him pin her down.

“The wings are cheating,” he huffs, dodging the wild flapping of the appendages in question.

She reaches behind herself to grab one of his knees, then beats her opposite wing hard in the air until she can tip him over sideways and roll onto her back, crushing him into the ground. “Plenty of people have wings. It’s good practice.”

“Most of them have— _ hhngh _ —hollow bones. Not,  _ ugh.  _ Metal.” As much as he struggles to breathe under Raphaella’s weight, Marius manages to worm one of his arms out from under her and wrap it around her neck.

He’s choked plenty of people before, but Raphaella proves to be surprisingly resilient, even when he’s  _ definitely  _ cutting off her blood flow. Right when he thinks she’s about to finally go limp, she grabs his thumb and yanks it back from his hand until he feels something  _ pop. _

Of course he wasn’t smart enough to choke her with his metal arm. He yelps as he feels his thumb dislocate, then lets go of Raphaella when she continues to attack his fingers. Gracious as ever, she rolls off of him and lets him clamber back to his feet, scowling down at his throbbing fingers. They’ll heal on their own within minutes, he knows, but that doesn’t stop it from hurting.

“I gave you a mechanism,” Raphaella reminds him. “I’d love to see you actually use it.”

Marius growls under his breath and pops his thumb back into place with a wince. “And you probably know where the secret kill switch is, too.”

She cocks her head like a bird and starts circling, hardly giving Marius time to gather himself before she starts making little jabs just to test his defenses. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Her tone is playful, her eyes gleaming with mischief, which soothes the tiny part of Marius that genuinely worries about her killing him in his sleep sometimes.

Before he can ponder that any further, she dodges to the side with the aid of her wings and kicks out at Marius’s ribs, underestimating his reflexes. Marius grabs her ankle and yanks her off her feet, though she manages to catch herself with her forearms and sweep his legs out from under him with her other foot. Back on the ground again, he extricates himself from Raphaella’s ankles and scrambles away from her flailing wings, then notices—she’s quick, and strong, and the wings are  _ absolutely  _ cheating, but she is, rather like a bird of prey, easily distracted by movement.

Marius takes advantage of this by rolling his flesh wrist around in a little flourish, pretending not to know how much he’s distracting her, before delivering a sharp uppercut with his mechanism and knocking her onto her back.

“Fuck,” Raphaella yelps as she falls, breath knocked out of her. Marius’s size—or lack thereof—makes him fast, and Raphaella doesn’t have time to throw him off before he grabs her wrists and pins them both above her head with his metal hand. With her wings half-crumpled under her, and Marius’s full weight straddling her midsection, she can’t shake him off no matter how hard she kicks. “Shit, alright, you win.  _ Fuck,  _ you’re fast.”

After a moment of tense suspicion where he waits for her to fake him out, Marius finally lets himself grin. “I  _ told  _ you I know what I’m doing?”

“Yeah, after I dislocated half your fingers!”

As much as he wants to bicker, Marius is distracted by the flush on her cheeks and her hair spread across the floor like a puddle of gold, and he forgets how to think for a long moment. He needs to get out of this room before he does something monumentally stupid. “Better luck next time, I guess,” he teases as he slowly lets go of her wrists and clambers to his feet before helping Raphaella up.

She just laughs and hip-checks him on her way out of the room.

\---

Raphaella is hovering mere inches from the ceiling, cleaning one of the vents that’s supposed to siphon any toxic gases out of her lab, when she hears a suspicious crinkling coming from the direction of Marius’s cot.

There are plenty of crinkly things in the lab, but this particular cellophane-ish noise makes her perk up instantly, because it sounds  _ exactly  _ like someone’s opening a snack pack of salmon dusty crunchies. As far as she’s aware, they ran out of salmon dusty crunchies weeks ago, which means that either her hearing betrays her, or Marius has been hiding them this whole time.

Instead of fluttering down to confront him right away, Raphaella finishes working on the vent first, because she has a bad feeling that one of her current experiments is about to go belly-up and would rather avoid dying from smoke inhalation any time soon. By the time she’s done, it’s siphoning the pungent odor of artificial salmon flavoring up toward her. “What are you eating?” she asks as she screws the grate back over the vent and floats back down to the floor, feigning indifference.

“Nothing,” Marius responds.

When she actually gets close enough to see him, there’s no sign of the snacks—no wrappers, no pink dust, just the lingering smell and Marius’s wide eyes. “What was that crinkling, then?”

He shrugs. “I dunno. Lots of stuff crinkles in here.”

“And the salmon smell?”

At that, Marius freezes. “I. Uh. Lots—um, lots of things—you’ve had that experiment running for a while, it might…”

Part of Raphaella is concerned about how anxious he looks, but the rest of her is deeply bitter about her own lack of salmon dusty crunchies, so she forges ahead. “I think you’re lying to me,  _ Baron.  _ I think you’ve been hoarding the salmon dusty crunchies, which is, in my professional opinion, a dick move.”

She’s messing with him, which she thinks is obvious, but when she stands up to her full height with her wings spread out and her hands on her hips, Marius goes visibly pale. “I didn’t—I d-didn’t mean to—um. S-sorry, I don’t know where—when—I. Uh.” He cuts himself off, shoulders hunched and eyes wide. “Th-those were the last ones. For real.”

“Are you sure about that?” Raphaella prompts, arching her eyebrows and studying his face. She’s more worried that something is genuinely wrong at this point, but centuries of floating through space alone didn’t give her the social skills to deal with this situation, whether she recognizes it or not.

Marius opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again, and then promptly jumps up from his cot and makes a run for it. Before Raphaella can process what’s happening, he’s gone, leaving neither hide nor hair of himself or the last of the salmon dusty crunchies.

Instead of chasing after him—since he clearly doesn’t want to be pursued—Raphaella lifts the edge of the blanket to peek under his cot and, as she predicted, finds a wildly disorganized stash of assorted snack foods. No more dusty crunchies, but plenty of pretzels and crackers and biscuits filling in the spaces between the storage bins where he keeps his clothing. In all honesty, she’s embarrassed of how long it takes her to actually put the pieces together, but then it hits her: of course Marius is hoarding food. He grew up  _ starving,  _ and as far as he sees it, she’s the one entirely in charge of providing food for them both.

“Fucking idiot,” she growls at herself. She should’ve known better. And now Marius thinks she’s angry with him, just for trying to stay well-fed, and she’s not sure how she’s going to fix this without putting him even more on the defensive.

She lets him hide for the time being, since he’s clearly distraught, and instead wanders around the kitchen in circles, looking for a way to apologize without making him talk about this obvious trigger. After an hour of talking to herself, mostly, she comes up with something that, as far as she can tell, is innocuous enough.

The next morning, while Marius slouches over a bowl of cereal, Raphaella opens one of the kitchen cabinets and presents it to him with a flourish. “If you want,” she starts, hesitant, “this can be yours. Anything you put in here is just for you, and I won’t touch it. And, like, you don’t have to buy your own food, you can just claim stuff, okay? Whatever you want.”

“This is about my snack hoard, isn’t it.”

Raphaella lets out a frustrated breath. “I—look, Marius. I’m really sorry for acting like—doing what I did yesterday. I know you’d survive whatever, but eating in the lab is  _ really  _ not a good idea, and I just… didn’t think about, um, why? Like, why you might not—why you have a stash in the first place. I’m sorry.”

As she speaks, an ounce of the tension in Marius’s shoulders drains away, though his eyes still flick across her face as if his survival depends on reading her every twitch. “I’m… sorry too?” he offers, before shaking his head. “No, fuck it. I just—I’m used to people trying to kill me over food. When I even have any. And I forget that people, uh,  _ don’t  _ always live like that.”

His straightforwardness surprises Raphaella, who looks down at her hands as she fiddles with the cabinet door. “I know it’s not exactly a habit you can just break,” she responds. “And I don’t expect you to! But, um, whatever you need to feel like—like I’m  _ not  _ about to murder you over food, I can offer. Whatever that means.”

“I know you’re not. Logically. I—I mean—maybe it’s not the best idea I’ve ever had, but I do trust you.” Before Raphaella’s heart can do something weird and twisty at his words, Marius drags himself to his feet and shuffles over to look at the cabinet, as if he hasn’t seen the inside of it dozens of times before. “I like this idea, though. I dunno. Baby Marius would’ve been over the fucking moon, but then again, he’d also be too busy losing his shit over the metal arm and all that.”

Raphaella smiles and reaches out, giving him space to lean into her arm as he chooses. “I, um. Had a really hard time remembering to eat when I was first… immortal. We don’t need to, technically, so I just didn’t.” She feels Marius tense under her arm, and rubs his shoulder reassuringly. “I won’t talk about it unless you want me to, I just—y’know, thought it might help to know that I’ve been there. In the opposite, kinda.”

“So maybe you  _ do  _ need some snacks in the lab, is what I’m hearing.”

_ “No,”  _ Raphaella laughs.

\---

Everything is wrong. He did everything wrong. The world is collapsing around him, groaning metal and screeching electronics and lights and sparks and the end of everything, all because of him. In a moment of relative lucidity, he slams his hand into the controls of his mecha, just in case there’s a panic button, a kill switch, some way to  _ stop  _ before the world goes to shit. But his fist comes down on the panel too hard and shatters half a dozen buttons, and the metal warps and crunches and then starts to fold  _ in  _ around his wrist, while he screams and struggles in what little space he has. Apparently his mistakes won’t kill him fast enough, because the mecha is pulling him forward, into the sparks and tearing and burning. As he pitches face-first into the control panel, he thinks that this must be the ending Byron von Raum deserves.

When, instead of dying, he opens his eyes to a dark room and a stiff bed creaking underneath him, Marius has no idea where he is.

He tries to sit up and get a sense of his surroundings, but his heart is racing so hard in his throat that he has to focus on just breathing instead. Above him, a few lights flicker out of sync—he’s not outside, nor is he in the abandoned ruins of some crumbling building, which is a good sign. Whirs and clicks and hisses sound off every few seconds around the room, and he thinks he ought to be afraid of those noises, but instead he’s strangely soothed.

Once his heartbeat returns to something manageable, Marius clambers out of bed and looks around. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but he can make out the vague shapes of implements and machinery that he doesn’t understand, which should make him anxious. Who knows what kind of mad scientist lives here? Could be a  _ doctor,  _ even, and he’d really rather not find out what they might have in store for him, but instead of terror, he just feels… okay. Like he’s  _ supposed _ to be sleeping in this strange laboratory. He looks down at his hands, just to make sure that he’s no longer dreaming, and startles when he finds that one of them is made of metal.

That opens the gates for a tiny trickle of memories to come back—first the mecha crushing his arm, then the angel dragging him from the wreckage and the harrowing surgery a few weeks later.  _ Raphaella.  _ Her face flashes behind his eyes, calming him even more, and without thinking, he takes off in the direction of her room in hopes of finding some comfort.

Before he can knock on her door, he realizes that it’s the middle of the night, and he’s not sure how she’ll respond to being awakened at the moment, no matter how well they get along in the daytime. Instead, he turns and shuffles into the kitchen, then plops himself down in a chair and stares blankly into the table while debating whether it’s worth the energy to stand up and make some tea. Every few seconds, another wave of devastating fear washes over him, both from the nightmare and the constant memory of all the ways his life has gone horribly wrong. His heart twists and  _ aches  _ in his chest, and all he can do is grit his teeth and ride it out.

After what could be minutes or hours, Marius is startled out of his self-pity by a groggy voice from the doorway. “Marius?” Raphaella mumbles, rubbing her eyes and pulling a blanket tight around her shoulders. “Wh’re you doin’ up?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” he answers hastily. “Um. Just—y’know, nightmares. Thought I’d come in here and be, uh, not in there.”

Raphaella nods as sagely as she can, given that she’s mostly unconscious, and pads over to the stove. “Wanna talk ‘bout it?”

“I really don’t.” By now, he hardly remembers the contents of the dream, just the crushing dread that won’t stop settling deeper and deeper into his chest. Despite the existential fear, his heart still swells with warmth when he takes in the fog of sleep in Raphaella’s expression. She looks so comfortable as she turns and stares into the cabinet, so much that Marius can’t stop the word  _ home  _ from welling up in his mind.

Before he can say something stupid, Raphaella pulls a canister off of a shelf and turns on the stove. “‘M makin’ hot chocolate. Want some?”

Marius loves her. Empirically, conclusively, wholly. “Yes, please.”

As she fumbles with the chocolate powder and milk, Marius rests his head on his arms and wishes that he was remotely tired enough to drift off here at the kitchen table. It’s been months now since he left his home and met Raphaella, but the bone-deep terror that followed him throughout his adolescence has yet to let up. During the day, he can follow Raph around and “assist” with her experiments, or learn some amateur psychology, or attempt to cook for them both. But now, in the painful hours of the morning, he’s stuck. “You could’ve woken me up, y’know,” Raphaella comments, her voice underscored by the  _ hiss  _ of a wooden spoon scraping the bottom of a saucepan.

“Mmh,” is all Marius can manage. He didn’t want to bother her, even if it would’ve been okay by her standards.

After a few more minutes of contemplative stirring, she pours the hot chocolate into the largest mugs they have, then sets one down in front of Marius and takes a seat on the other side of the tiny table. His hands shake as he reaches for his drink. Raphaella reaches out without making eye contact and takes one of them, her fingers warm and steady.

He doesn’t say anything, but he squeezes her hand back and does his best to offer her a smile.

Raphaella’s eyes drift shut a few times as she sips her hot chocolate, but she stays awake if only by virtue of sheer willpower. It makes Marius feel… not important, per se, but  _ significant  _ in a way that he can’t remember feeling before, that she cares enough to sacrifice her limited sleep in favor of comforting him. Her thumb brushes the back of his hand, absent-minded and almost light enough to tickle.

“You don’t have to stay up with me,” Marius mumbles.

She blinks her eyes open and frowns at him. “And you shouldn’t have to be alone. Plus, I’m tired enough that I can’t rationalize myself out of using the… precious stores of hot chocolate.” The last few words are muffled as she nearly faceplants in her mug, then takes a loud slurp. “Might fall asleep again soon, but not ‘cause I wanna. ‘M just. Not awake, ‘s all.”

With a world-weary sigh, Marius finishes the last of his mug and draws himself to his feet. “I should try and go back to bed, I guess. You too.”

“Yeah.” Raphaella drags herself to her feet once Marius lets go of her hand, though she wobbles as if she can’t remember how to stand. Regardless, Marius hears her shuffling footsteps follow him to the sink, and he takes her mug and rinses it out along with his own. When he turns back to her, she’s still standing inches away from him, her soft cheeks marked with the faint imprints of where they were pressed into a pillow a bit too hard. “Or you could come back to my room.”

Marius forgets what a sentence is. “I? Um? I. Could maybe. Why would—uh, where… What?”

Her hand rests on his flesh forearm, stopping him short. “I—not in a—I didn’t mean like… I’m not trying to put the moves on you or whatever. Just, you might, y’know, sleep better if you’re not alone? Or in the lab. All the chemicals might be getting to your brain. Or something.” She waves a hand around as if batting imaginary fumes away from his face.

It’s a flimsy justification, but Marius is too tired to care. “If… if you think it’s worth a try, then. Yeah.”

Before he can overthink this idea, Raphaella gets between him and the sink and starts herding him out of the kitchen, nudging him with her shoulders and tugging her blanket tighter around herself. Marius crosses his arms over his chest just so he has something to do with them, and shuffles his feet against the ground just to keep himself connected to some facet of reality as Raphaella steers him back toward her room.

It’s not the first time Marius has been in her bedroom, but in the past, he stuck to an arbitrary radius around her desk where he could lean on it and look cool without feeling like he was intruding too much. So when Raphaella throws herself to the far side of her bed and then turns back to him, patting the space next to her, Marius freezes. “I, uh, just realized,” he mutters, shifting from one foot to the other, “that you have, like, an entire queen-sized bed. And I don’t even have a  _ room.” _

“It’s a single-occupant spaceship,” Raphaella responds. Already, her eyelids are fluttering as she struggles to stay awake. “Big bed means I get to share. So c’mere.”

Marius stares at her for another moment. He’s torn between the part of him that doesn’t want to make her uncomfortable, that knows his feelings for her are not innocent or platonic, that drowns in guilt at the thought of being so close to her; and the part of him that craves her proximity as if it’s the only remedy to the homesickness that always nips at the back of his mind. Well, he figures, she wouldn’t have invited him here if she didn’t  _ want  _ him here. “I don’t think I’m gonna be able to fall asleep again.”

“‘S okay.” She beckons him again, this time reaching out a wing in his direction.

As soon as Marius lies down next to her, Raphaella throws an arm and a wing across his waist and buries her face in his shoulder. He doesn’t have the brainpower to decide how to feel about that at the moment, so he just blushes instead, at least until she commands the lights to shut off and then falls asleep instantly.

There’s a porthole in the wall over her bed, glimmering here and there with stars too far away to comprehend, and Marius watches a million shades of darkness drift by outside, in contrast with the steady familiarity of Raphaella’s golden hair splayed across her pillow. When she starts murmuring in her sleep and clutches him closer, the arm around him going tense, Marius has to bite his lip to keep from crying.

He’s not sure what he’s ever done to deserve this.

\---

Raphaella wakes up warm in a way that she doesn’t remember being… ever, possibly. Something fluffy tickles her nose, and whatever it is, she squeezes it closer to her chest like a stuffed moonbeast. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t have one of those, but she’s not about to complain about having something to hold after drifting alone through the cosmos for so long.

Her room starts to brighten as the ship’s night cycle rolls into day, and she opens her eyes—just a crack—to discover that the thing she’s holding is not, in fact, a stuffed animal, but rather a Marius. He’s curled up in a tight ball, knees clutched to his chest, but as Raphaella shifts and stretches the wing draped over him, she notices how firmly his back is pressed against her. She’s got an arm around his waist, and her other one is half-crushed somewhere under the unruly mop of his hair, and she never wants to move from this spot ever again.

Then she realizes that she has no idea  _ why  _ Marius is in her bed. They’re both clothed, and the blankets aren’t too mussed, so that rules out a few possibilities. On the other hand, she can’t imagine him stumbling into her room to sleep in her bed of his own volition. Maybe… as she blinks and unfocuses her eyes, she conjures a vague memory of finding him in the kitchen, eyes wide and desolate with the remnants of a nightmare. She must’ve brought him back in hopes of comforting him. So if she drops dead from the sheer force of  _ pining,  _ she only has herself to blame.

Before she can dive too deep into self-blame, he mumbles something in his sleep and rolls over, into her embrace. “Marius?” she whispers, just in case he’s awake.

“Hmnh,” he grunts.

That’s enough to reassure Raphaella, who squeezes him close and flops her head back onto her pillow in hopes of falling asleep again. It doesn’t happen, because it’s daytime and she’s already slept much more than her immortal body needs. So instead, she just closes her eyes to avoid studying every detail of Marius’s sleeping face until she feels him grumble and stretch against her.

“Wha’s…” One of his arms reaches out and  _ thwacks _ her in the stomach. “Hmm. Raph…?”

Raphaella relaxes her hold on him, just in case he freaks out once he’s awake enough to realize where he is. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Where… are we?”

“In my room,” she answers, voice small. “You, um, had a nightmare, and I offered to—to let you—to share. My, uh, my bed.”

He makes a sound in the back of his mouth that Raphaella can’t decipher. “That’s nice of you. Kind. You’re so kind to me, Raph.”

At this point, she can no longer justify keeping her eyes closed, so she opens them to find Marius staring up at her in unrestrained adoration. He’s still half-asleep, but as Raphaella watches, his cheeks turn red with awareness. “I—um—I’m, well, I think you’re. You’re worth it. Y’know?”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “I dunno about that, but I trust your judgment.” His dark eyes move down her face in increments, as if drinking in her every feature, until he pauses with his mouth half-open and his breath cool against her neck. “Can I kiss you?”

It takes a full five seconds for Raphaella to remember how to make sounds with her mouth.  _ “Please.” _

Maybe he’s just brave because it’s early and he’s hardly awake; maybe he’ll regret this by the end of the day; maybe he  _ has  _ been aching for her touch as she did for his this whole time. Raphaella doesn’t know. With his lips gentle on hers and his hand combing through her hair to hold the back of her head in place, she doesn’t care. She holds onto every inch of contact, enveloping him in her wings and sighing into his mouth when he tilts his head to kiss her deeper.

For the first time since she became immortal, Raphaella truly feels like she’s not alone anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S BEEN LIKE 3 WEEKS AAAAAAA. HELLO. IM SORRY. writing brain has been... barely functional. brain in general barely functional. I like my new job a lot and I'm doing much better with a consistent schedule and Interesting Science to do, but I also have a 45-minute commute and that leaves me with very little time or brainpower left at the end of the day. BUT... I made the smooch happen. They did it! Now time to talk about their feelings. Perhaps. Or keep being dumbasses.
> 
> I'm not exactly sure where this fic is gonna go next—I had planned to carry it all the way until they met the rest of the Mechs, but I don't have very many ideas for scenes between now and then, and that's where I really struggle with long fics (filling in the Between Parts). So it might go on a bit of a hiatus while I figure out what I want to do with it and/or write some vent fics cuz I... really need to. I'll keep you all updated.
> 
> As always, comments mean the world to me and I hope you all enjoyed this chapter!!! ily sleep well drink water do your homework etc etc!!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> -Talk of stabbing and poisoning  
> -Argument  
> -Threats

There’s a weird smell coming from Raphaella’s desk, and it’s not until Marius has laid in bed for half an hour, drifting in and out of sleep while Raphaella snores next to him, that he thinks to investigate it. He hesitates to leave the warm space under the blankets, the part of the universe that’s just the two of them, but then Raphaella rolls over and kicks him somewhere near the kidney, and Marius stifles a groan as he drags himself to his feet.

Over the past week, he’s slowly moved into Raphaella’s room—first spending the night, then eventually filling up space with what few belongings he has. It’s the one room on the ship that’s actually big enough for two people to cohabitate. Well, except for the lab, which is full of deadly equipment that he’s frankly glad to avoid at night. All that aside, Marius still feels like he’s about to have a small heart attack every time he wakes up so close to Raphaella.

He starts picking through her desk as quietly as he can, first brushing aside a half-dozen mismatched pens and notebooks, then discarded pipets and weirdly small beakers. What could she  _ possibly  _ be doing with beakers this small? Marius opens the topmost drawer of the desk and finds at least a dozen petri dishes, each growing a different nauseating color of slime and emanating a stench that should’ve been more obvious from outside.

“Mph,” comes Raphaella’s voice. When Marius looks over to the bed, her eyes are open, if bleary, and she’s smiling up at him. “Y’found my samples.”

“Samples?” Marius looks back down at the drawer, where some of the mystery slime seems to swim in front of his eyes.

With a dramatic yawn, Raphaella wiggles closer to the edge of the bed, but pulls the covers tighter around her shoulders instead of getting up. “Yep. Took some from your arm. I mean, I’ve still got the arm, this is just—jus’, y’know, arm germs. Good ol’... yeah.”

Marius grimaces at the assorted petri dishes. “And they’re not, like, dangerous?”

“Erm… could be, I guess. Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

When he closes the drawer and turns to face her again, Raphaella is looking at him with sun-warmed, unrestrained affection in her eyes, too soft and gentle to exist outside of this hazy half-asleep moment. Marius stares back at her—he doesn’t want to think about what his face is doing, so he dives back into bed and buries his face in Raphaella’s neck, holding in a breathless giggle as she disentagles her arms from the sheets to hold him in return. “I’m kinda worried about the arm bacteria growing unchecked,” he admits, “but I really—um. You’re very cute, is all. I’d rather be over here. With you.”

Raphaella finds his face with one hand and tips his chin up until he’s within kissing range. “I can move them… later. Wanna make out with you first. Just for a bit.”

“I’m down,” Marius murmurs as he wriggles back under the covers to tangle his legs with hers.

Later, after they’ve had breakfast (interspersed with egregious kissing), Raphaella enlists Marius’s help to move the wayward samples to the lab and catalogue them. She produces a diagram that looks to Marius like a bunch of poorly-drawn circles, and slaps it down onto a lab bench next to a teetering pile of petri dishes. “You’re going to sort the bacteria by colony shape,” she explains. “These diagrams will show you what you’re looking for. You can factor in color, too, if you have enough space to separate them. That’ll make it easier for me to cross-reference the species for identification.”

“Wait, why can’t you just zap them with the DNA beam?” Marius asks, nose wrinkling. This seems awfully tedious, though he knows he’ll probably enjoy it once he gets into the groove.

Raphaella looks up at the ceiling and feigns innocence as her wings tuck tightly behind her back. “I, uh, the DNA beam is currently… undergoing repairs. I may have set it on fire last week.”

“Set it on  _ fire?” _

He watches her eyes flick back and forth, as if looking for an appropriate response somewhere in the ceiling, before she turns back to the nearest computer with a flutter of her wings. “Anyway! I’ll print out a spreadsheet so you can write them down.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Marius laughs. He wants to give her a hard time about setting her own valuable equipment on fire for unknown reasons, but it’s impossible to keep the affection out of his voice when she’s fluttering around the lab in a sports bra, a pair of his boxers, and a lab coat barely hanging from her shoulders.

“You’re not the scientist here. You don’t get to ask questions,” she replies.

Marius rolls his eyes, but he pulls the first stack of samples to the edge of the table and sits down to examine the chart she gave him. “I thought questioning things is what  _ makes  _ you a scientist. You’re always telling me—”

“Maybe I don’t  _ want  _ a scientist today! I just want an assistant!”

Their bickering continues as Marius organizes the bacteria and Raphaella tends to her daily tasks. Every time she finds a particularly unusual result in her readouts, her wings flap hard enough that she’s halfway airborne by the time she realizes what she’s doing. And, every time, Marius catches himself staring at her with unrestrained adoration until he remembers that he’s actually supposed to be  _ doing  _ something.

Once she’s done with her dailies, Raphaella returns to the lab bench and slides into the chair across from Marius, looking over the samples he’s already sorted. Her fingers tap across the plastic lids of the petri dishes in a syncopated rhythm, landing on something absurdly purple and stinky. “Now  _ this  _ one looks interesting.”

“I imagine they’re all interesting,” Marius replies. “My arm was a fucking mess.”

She shrugs. “I mean, most of them just look like normal skin bacteria. Strep, staph, all that. Oh, I like that you’ve grouped all the ones that look like nipples.”

“Why do so many bacteria look like nipples?” he murmurs, adding another plate to the pile in question.

“Life imitates art, my dear. Don’t question it.”

Once the samples are all sorted, Raphaella uses Marius as her scribe, making him mark species names and measurements into her spreadsheet while she performs a barrage of inscrutable tests on each plate. By the time she’s burned holes through four of them with assorted acids, he’s fully convinced that she’s just fucking around. When she starts to refill the acid dropper and reach for another sample, Marius kicks a leg out and deposits it in her lap with a  _ thunk. _

“You’re not science-ing anymore,” he complains. “You’re just trying to see how fast you can kill us with acid fumes.”

Raphaella snorts, but doesn’t take her attention away from the dish in her hand. “And in what way is that  _ not  _ an experiment, Marius?”

“Well, you’re not writing it down. And I didn’t hear any mention of experimental design, or statistical validity, or—”

“Fuck. You’re learning too fast.” She puts the acid down at last, then turns to Marius with a grin and tugs on the leg currently stretched across her lap, which sends Marius’s chair rolling closer until she’s within range to grab him by the shirt and kiss him. “I should’ve known.”

Distractible as she is, Raphaella forgets about the petri dishes and spreadsheets in front of her in favor of tangling her fingers in Marius’s hair and nibbling on his lip. “You’re just really excited about hearing me say the words ‘statistical validity,’ aren’t you,” Marius mumbles into her mouth.

“I don’t have to answer that.”

Before she can finish her sentence, something on the bench starts sizzling furiously, and Raphaella pulls back with a start to figure out what’s gone wrong before it can kill them and everything else in the lab. Marius feels a bit dazed, even though he’s starting to adjust to the perpetual whirlwind of existing around Raphaella. “Did you… spill some acid?” he asks, extracting his leg from her lap so she can move freely.

Raphaella picks up a couple of samples and examines their undersides with a frown. “I think it burned through one of the dishes,” she muses. “Don’t know which one. Help me look, you’re the one with a metal arm.”

They only have to check a few more dishes before Marius finds the one with a raggedy hole melted through the plastic, and Raphaella locks it safely away in some kind of containment unit, insisting that it’ll be interesting to study if the acid doesn’t kill all the bacteria first. When that’s done, she turns back to the bench full of samples and crosses her arms in frustration. “This is taking too long, and I’m hungry. Break for lunch?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Marius teases.

His culinary talents have been coming along nicely, so Marius fixes them laser-grilled cheese sandwiches and then pulls his chair around to Raphaella’s side of the table so he can lean his head on her shoulder while he eats. There’s hardly enough room for  _ one  _ person on any given side of the table, but that only gives Marius a more plausible excuse to nestle under her outstretched wing and soak up her warmth.

A feeling has been bubbling in his chest for weeks now, and being so close to Raphaella only makes it sharper, to the point where he can nearly put it in words. “Raph,” he starts, through a mouthful of sandwich, “do you ever feel like there’s something… missing? Like you—I keep having this feeling like I  _ need  _ something that’s not in my life, and it never has been, but I’m almost homesick for it. Not just something. A lot of somethings, I think. But I don’t know what it is, or how to find it.”

Raphaella is silent for a minute, though her metal feathers flutter against Marius’s shoulder, so he knows she’s thinking about his words. “Yeah,” she answers at last. “Like there’s a part—or a bunch of parts—of me missing. Like I’m just going to keep aching for it until I figure out what it is.” She opens her mouth as if to say something else, but takes a self-conscious bite of her sandwich instead.

“It’s better when I’m with you,” says Marius.

The wing across his shoulders curls in tight, until he’s pressed against her side. “Yeah,” Raphaella mumbles. “Yeah, it is.”

\---

“Raphaellaaa,” Marius whines. “You said we were gonna go back to the ship half an hour ago. What are you even  _ looking  _ for?”

Her wings flare out behind her back for just a moment, before she reaches out to grab Marius’s metal hand and interlace their fingers. They’re walking past a line of kitschy tourist traps and quaint little cafes, lit by the pinkish glow of the small sun on a planet too forgettable to mention. And yet Raphaella seems hell-bent on finding  _ something  _ that she won’t explain, examining each storefront and alleyway with eagle-sharp eyes. “I told you, I don’t know,” she hisses. “It just feels like we shouldn’t leave yet. There’s… I don’t know what to tell you. I’ll know it when I see it.”

Marius continues to grumble, but he’s admittedly soothed by the opportunity to hold hands with her. If they were normal humans and not immortal evil scientist-pirates, this might be a nice spot for a date. As it stands, though, they have thousands of better options—dying supernovas, abandoned laboratories, crystalline caverns in the cores of glacier planets too cold for mortals to explore. No matter how wild their surroundings, Marius feels the same fumbling joy as any squishy human at the thought of being on a  _ date. _

Before he can get too distracted by the thought of tacky souvenir shopping with Raphaella, she stops so fast that he nearly runs into one of her wings. “Hey, what’s—huh?”

Raphaella’s eyes are fixed on something—someone—across the street. “There,” she murmurs, squeezing Marius’s hand. “You see her?”

He follows Raphaella’s gaze to a café across the street, its name painted in a language that neither of them speak; in front of the windows, a woman sits alone at one of the wobbly wrought iron tables flanking the door. From here, Marius can’t make out her face, especially since she seems to sink into the shadow of the broad red umbrella sheltering her from the sun. Regardless, she’s watching them just as much as they watch her, and Marius doesn’t have time to draw any conclusions before Raphaella grips his hand tighter and starts pulling him into the road.

“Raph,” he yelps as he half-trips over the curb. “Who the fuck is that? What are we—”

“This is it,” she cuts him off. “I don’t know—just—if I tell you to run, you run. Okay?”

They’re already in earshot of the woman, so Marius just nods and steps even closer to Raphaella.

As soon as they step onto the sidewalk in front of the café, the woman removes her sunglasses and beckons them with a tilt of her head. She doesn’t say anything, apparently waiting for them to decide whether to address her or run in the opposite direction, but Marius feels as if the weight of her eyes on him is enough to turn him to ice.

“You’ve been waiting for us,” Raphaella says. It’s not a question. Marius knows it too, not with as much certainty, but deep in his gut.

The woman nods and gestures at the table with her hands this time—there are two chairs across from her, pulled in close together under the shade of the umbrella, with a menu resting on the table as if to keep up the pretense that they’re just meeting someone for lunch. “I have been,” she replies in a voice like rainfall on scorched earth. “We have a lot to talk about.”

Up close, Marius realizes that she’s sitting in a motorized wheelchair, with a couple of silver canes and a ukulele poking out of a pocket on the back. Her lanky legs are tilted to one side so they can actually fit under the table, and the turquoise hair falling over her eyes seems to glow. She’s not human—pointy ears, pointy teeth, eyes that are catlike in a way Marius can’t describe, but none of those features are all that unusual on their own.

Raphaella slides into one of the chairs, slow and deliberate, and Marius follows her lead. The woman gives him a tiny smile, though it’s clear that her attention is focused mostly on Raphaella. “Do you know who I am?” she begins.

“N—wait.” Raphaella’s eyes flicker across every detail of the woman’s face as if calculating something, until it finally clicks, and her breath catches in her throat. “You’re her, aren’t you?” she breathes. “The Doctor. I  _ found  _ you!”

The Doctor, whoever she is, snorts. “Rather the other way around, I think. I’ve been watching you for a while.” She then turns to Marius and extends one graceful hand, smirking patiently until he shakes it. “I’d hate to leave you out of the loop. I’m Doctor Carmilla.”

“Marius,” he replies as he tries to infuse his handshake with some sliver of confidence. She can probably see right through it, but something about her puts him on edge, and it doesn’t help that Raphaella is practically vibrating with excitement next to him.

“I can’t believe—I’ve—I looked for you for  _ years!  _ Lots of people are saying you’re dead, you know,” Raphaella rambles on.

Carmilla’s smile only widens. “They’re not wrong.”

The playful note in her voice makes Marius’s hair stand on end. “Wait,” he interrupts, glancing at Raphaella. “The doctor… the one who you designed our, uh, our mechanisms after?”

“Yes!” Raphaella exclaims, though she’s too busy leaning across the table to actually take note of his trepidation. “I’m a huge fan of your work.”

“I can tell,” Carmilla replies, casting a critical gaze over her wings. Marius thinks that it might be intended as an insult, but if it is, Raphaella doesn’t notice, and the Doctor moves on before he can challenge her. “May I?” she asks, reaching out for Marius’s right hand where it rests on the table.

He shook her hand moments ago, and she didn’t manage to kill him then, so Marius offers his arm and tries to hold it still as Carmilla turns it over in her hands, inspecting every joint and seam in the metal. Of course, he has no idea what she’s actually looking for; he has more mechanical knowledge than he lets on, but there are still components to his arm that he can’t hope to understand.

“It’s rushed,” Carmilla comments after a few minutes, before setting Marius’s arm back down on the table and patting it a couple times. “Not as artful as those wings, by any means. But you have incredible skill, Raphaella la Cognizi.”

At the sound of her own name, Raphaella makes an anxious little click in the back of her throat. “I—he was dying of sepsis, I didn’t really  _ plan  _ it,” she explains. “But. Thank you.”

Marius has never heard Raphaella make excuses for her science before, and it makes his stomach churn.

“Even so,” Carmilla continues, “the fact that you’re here right now means that you succeeded, hence why we need to talk.”

In her excitement, Raphaella’s wings spread out until one of them smacks Marius in the shoulder, and he shoves it away. “Did you summon us somehow? They’re not—are we  _ connected  _ to you, or…?”

“I meant the fact that you’re alive. The poison that I used on you would’ve killed a mortal human a dozen times over.”

Confusion morphs into realization on Raphaella’s face, as she strings the words together and, at last, realizes that Carmilla’s not just here to critique her work. “Poison,” she echoes, leaning back into her chair and crossing her arms over her chest. “Poison. That fucking  _ knife,  _ that was you?”

Carmilla just raises her eyebrows, as if the answer is already obvious.

“You fucking stabbed me? That was  _ awful!  _ You can’t just—just throw knives at people—”

“Can’t I?” Carmilla cuts in. The last of her smirk drops away, leaving a stern coldness that curdles Marius’s blood.

When he looks over to Raphaella, it’s clear that she’s not indignant about reckless endangerment of human life in general, so much as the fact that Carmilla dared to poison  _ her. _

Before any further argument can break out, a waiter waltzes out from the café and offers them drinks from a selection of carafes on a delicate tray. Most of the drinks are things Marius has never heard of, which is par for the course on new planets, as he’s discovered; he and Raphaella both request the closest thing they can find to black coffee, while Carmilla orders a hot chocolate-ish thing that smells delightfully sweet. The waiter gives them all a breezy smile before disappearing back into the building, leaving the tension of the moment stirred but unbroken.

After a few sips of her drink, Carmilla fixes Raphaella in her appraising stare again. “Regardless of my personal ethics,” she says, “my attempting to poison you confirmed something significant, which is that you are the first person to successfully recreate my mechanization process. And believe me, many have tried.”

Raphaella’s breath stops so fast that Marius sees it out of the corner of his eye—the way her body catches, every feather freezing. “I am?” she says, dumbfounded. “I mean, I assumed I would’ve found  _ something  _ in the literature, but—but I’m not great at writing up my own results, after all, so I thought…”

“That’s not a compliment,” Carmilla clarifies. “It just means that you had the… gumption to put the pieces together, which makes you dangerous. Clearly.”

“Raph,” Marius mumbles, warning. He doesn’t like the way Carmilla’s voice changes on each word, like a blade being honed.

She reaches out to interlace their fingers again, but doesn’t look at him. “I thought that went without saying,” she replies, brushing a lock of hair out of her face.

“Listen to me, Raphaella.” Carmilla puts her cup down and leans her face on one hand. “I know how it feels. The ecstasy of knowing you’re beyond death, thinking you can’t possibly come down from it, even if you have all the time in the universe. And then you realize that you’ll be alone, that no one can ever keep up with you—even if they can match your wits, their lives will blink out in seconds. Perhaps you think it’ll be fine, at first. But you watch enough people die, and no matter how disciplined or introverted or misanthropic you are”—she glances at Marius—“I think we both know how that story ends.”

A muscle twitches in Raphaella’s jaw as she chews on her words. “I didn’t  _ plan  _ to make… Marius,” she argues. “It was—I had the supplies on hand, and he—”

“That’s what concerns me,” Carmilla continues. “The ease with which you did it once. Well, twice. What’s stopping you now, hm? Because I thought one was enough. I made—I built a mechanism, I put it in a person, and I thought that would be enough to heal me.” Her voice breaks, and through the calculated facade of the Doctor shines a tiny pinprick of the searing-bright pain of  _ truly  _ eternal life. “Turns out, when the universe breaks someone, it takes more than a metal heart to put them back together, and I’m not a particularly good counselor. Or, well, I didn’t have that degree at the time. The long and short of it is that he hated me, so I made more. And they hated me. So I made more. Do you understand?”

All of a sudden, Raphaella is gripping Marius’s hand so tightly that he can’t feel his fingertips. “Marius doesn’t hate me, though. I don’t—there’s no…”

“The loneliness is still there, though. Isn’t it?”

Silence stretches between the three of them for a long moment, while Raphaella’s wings tuck close behind her back and Carmilla stretches her arms like a sleepy cat. With every word, Marius feels more and more like a pawn in their conversation, rather than a participant, and he’s tempted to just scream until one of them stabs him so he doesn’t have to deal with it anymore. Sure, he’s not a scientist, not a  _ genius  _ like them, but he likes to think that he’s something. Enough for Raphaella, maybe. But then she lets go of his hand and sits up straight, wings still folded tight, and something awful sinks into the pit of Marius’s stomach.

“You make a lot of assumptions,” Raphaella says curtly. “I am well aware of my biological imperatives, and while it  _ helps  _ to have Marius around, I fared just fine on my own and I can do so again. Perhaps we’re just different people, Doctor.”

Carmilla’s voice remains as gentle as ever, but her eyes turn cold. “Regardless of your self-confidence, eternity is a long time to wander around with this kind of knowledge. So believe me, Raphaella, when I say that if you ever do this again—mechanize another person—I will kill you. I am the only one who knows how, and even if it  _ doesn’t  _ work, I will make you regret every moment that led you to that decision. Are we clear?”

Quiet fury burns in Raphaella’s trembling wings. “Certainly,” she hisses.

Caught in their orbit, Marius feels like his heart is going to drop out of his chest and roll away. “Um,” he pipes up, “if—if it’s so bad to, uh, mechanize people, then… what happened to all the others? The other—the people you… made.”

“Not what happened to them,” Carmilla corrects. “What happened to the people around them.” Still, misery flashes in her eyes as she stares down at the table, losing herself in memory for a few seconds. “I suspect you’ll find out for yourselves soon enough.”

Raphaella huffs in frustration and downs the last of her coffee before standing up from the table, her wings spread to their full width even as her hands clench into shaky fists. “Thank you for the  _ advice,  _ Doctor, but I’m confident in my own abilities. And if you’ve got nothing better to do than wander around the galaxy babysitting other mad scientists, I have to wonder if you’re losing your touch.”

Before Carmilla can begin to respond, Raphaella turns and stalks away from the table, and Marius scrambles to his feet to follow her before the Doctor can take any frustrations out on him. He didn’t get to drink enough coffee to deal with this. Raphaella is walking too fast for him to keep up without jogging, her features shuttered and stony, and Marius wants to scream until she stops and  _ looks  _ at him.

“Raph,” he hisses once he gets close enough to grab her hand. “She could’ve fucking  _ killed  _ us! You can’t just—”

“She couldn’t,” Raphaella insists, yanking her hand out of Marius’s grip. “She was bluffing. I’m not a damn doormat, and I’m not going to let her tell me what to do with my own immortality.”

The rage in her eyes is hot enough to make Marius step back, but he still follows her when she continues speed-walking toward the ship. “Wait, are you  _ planning  _ to mechanize someone else? Raph!”

“We’ll talk about this on the ship,” she shuts him down without turning around. But her words are sharp enough to crystallize the dread in Marius’s throat, and he has to remind himself how to breathe until they’re back home and safe again.

\---

Behind the controls of her ship, Raphaella finally allows herself to breathe deeply and take stock of her body. Her hands are uncomfortably hot, there’s a dull lump in her throat, and she feels almost as if she’s about to cry, which is  _ not  _ something that she generally allows herself to do. If she were to look in a mirror, she knows that her face would be bright red. And yet, Marius follows her into the room and slumps into the co-pilot’s chair as if he’s hell-bent on arguing, so she hardly has the time to try and calm herself down.

“Raph, we need to  _ talk  _ about this,” he insists, leaning toward her. “The way Carmilla talked about—about other Mechanisms, other creations—it makes me think we’re in danger. We need to know—”

“And we will,” Raphaella snaps. She continues to stare into the dashboard as she plugs the takeoff sequence into the ship and zooms away from the planet, leaving Doctor Carmilla where they found her. “I’m not worried about that, frankly. I’ve had plenty of time to study my own mechanism, and I’ll have even more time to work with yours. Or do  _ you  _ doubt me, too?”

When she whips her head up to look at him, Marius’s features are taut with trepidation, his dark eyes wide and shining. “What are you talking about? Of course I don’t doubt you! And I don’t think she did either, she was just threatening you because she’s a mad scientist and that seems to be how you lot communicate.”

“I don’t care about her!” The hot anxiety rising in Raphaella’s face threatens to turn to tears, which only makes her all the more furious, and she pulls her wings in as if to hug herself as she continues, staring straight ahead at the sky. “I—it’s—she acted like I  _ need  _ companions, as if I didn’t make it by myself for fucking  _ centuries.  _ She doesn’t know me. To suggest that—I can’t—surely you of all people understand what I’m getting at, Marius? You were on your own, too.”

He recoils, just a bit. “I wasn’t,” he responds softly, hands gripping the armrests of his chair. “I had friends. They died. And now I have you. And sure, it scares me to need people, but that doesn’t mean—”

“Don’t finish that sentence. You don’t know what I can or can’t do, you don’t know what it’s like to be me and do what I’ve done.” Raphaella’s voice shakes; she’s never felt a shred of remorse in her life, and she’s not about to start now, but that doesn’t make her personal history any less gruesome.

“Maybe it’s not about you!” Marius turns his chair to face her fully, which strikes Raphaella as just begging for her attention. “You think you don’t need anyone, but what—if you can just go off on your own and live your own immortal life, I’d lose my fucking mind.  _ I  _ need someone. But you clearly don’t care about that.”

Raphaella barks a laugh, as the ship rumbles its way out of the atmosphere and into space. “How would you know? You’re strong. Wouldn’t have survived the surgery, otherwise. I could kick you off on any planet in this system and you’d find someone else to bother within hours. And then you’d forget about me, after I  _ created  _ you, and—”

“You didn’t create me,” Marius shouts. “I was already a person! You didn’t make me who I am now!”

The rage burning in his eyes says otherwise. The fabric of the armrest tearing under his metal hand says otherwise. But Raphaella doesn’t point those things out, because if Marius hasn’t figured out how much mechanization changes people, then there wasn’t much to change in the first place; he’s always been angry, after all. Instead, she takes a deep, trembling breath and swivels her chair until they’re face-to-face in some half-baked attempt at honesty.

“Just tell me,” he pleads, “were you planning to mechanize anyone else?”

When Raphaella opens her mouth to answer, the words catch in her throat.

“I’ve seen the blueprints,” Marius carries on, voice raw. “I know mine was… spontaneous, but you could do it. Any day now, you could get sick of me and build yourself the perfect lab assistant. Perfect boyfriend, even. And then—”

“Are you  _ jealous?  _ Is that why you’re making such a fuss?” Raphaella spits, crossing her arms over her chest. The searing misery in her throat stands at odds with her words, as she falls so easily into taunting like the heartless creature she wants to be. “You really thought that you were my life’s work, and you’d be the best thing that happened to me forever? Gods, von Raum, you’ve got an ego the size of a fucking moon. Yes, I have blueprints. No, I don’t currently have any plans, and after your procedure went so belly-up, I’m not exactly dying to try again. But if we’re really going to live  _ forever,  _ you might have to accept that you’re not the only experiment to hold a place in my heart.”

By now, Marius’s face has twisted into a painful scowl, his soft nose scrunched up and body curled in around himself. “Fine. If you’re so happy being on your own, I don’t see why I ought to stick around and play with my own feelings. Have a nice eternity.”

With that, he pushes himself out of the chair and storms out of the bridge. Raphaella listens to his footsteps as they carry him past the kitchen, past their room, past the lab—to the tiny loading bay where their lone escape pod waits, and even from this distance, she hears the bioscanner  _ ding  _ as it lets him in. “Fuck,” she whispers to herself. “Are you  _ serious,  _ you idiot?”

Silence for a beat, and then another, and then the escape pod closes and detaches with a  _ whoosh. _

Still in the pilot’s chair, Raphaella tilts her head back to keep her traitorous tears in her eyes where they belong, even as she speeds farther away from Marius with every passing second. She didn’t think that he’d actually leave. “Fuck,” she repeats. “Gods  _ damn  _ it, la Cognizi. Guess you’ll get to prove your fucking independence after all.”

All at once, she remembers Marius asking about that yearning in his chest, the feeling that something vital is missing—the feeling that abated, if only in increments, as Marius recovered from his mechanization. She never told him as much, of course. But now, as the darkness of deep space falls over her and her empty ship echoes her bitten-off sobs, Raphaella feels its return like a knife in the back, not poisoned this time but serrated and cruel.

Still, she’s survived worse. She can make it through this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohohohohoho I hope you all didn't think I'd just breeze through this whole story without any real angst!!! FUCK arguments are really hard to write though. I had so many conversation beats that I wanted to hit and I have no idea if I actually managed, because god forbid I ever write things down. yknow. before I write them. all that being said, if the arguments make No Fucking Sense, it may be in part because I have no idea what it's like to Not Have BPD and it very much shows in my writing. also I was so so so excited to write Carmilla that all my other brain cells died. I had no idea what I was gonna do between this and the end of the fic, and then I thought HMMM haven't written the doc in a hot minute, and BAM! look at me! real story structure!
> 
> I will. try not to go a month without updating this again, because it seems cruel to leave you all like this. however I am doing the penumbra minibang and I have written about 500 words for it. so. that's a thing. I promise things will get better though, and I have some JUICY catharsis planned DO NOT FEAR.
> 
> I love you all so much, the response to this fic has been incredible and I love hearing what people think of it!! [OH ALSO THERE'S ART NOW. BEHOLD THIS. YES.](https://unearted.tumblr.com/post/637795939569090561/marius-and-raph-inspired-by-an-amazing-fic-by)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE HEED THE WARNINGS ON THIS ONE! it's a doozy!  
> -Alcohol  
> -Violence  
> -Abduction  
> -Brief mention of self-harm  
> -Unhealthy coping mechanisms in general  
> -Cults  
> -Ritual violence  
> -Attempted human sacrifice/dismemberment  
> -Torture  
> -Threats  
> -Gore/blood/injury in detail  
> -Murder
> 
> If you have questions about any of the warnings and/or would like "timestamps" (so to speak) to avoid certain things, PLEASE feel free to message me on tumblr (@alderations), twitter (@alderwrites), or discord!! I want you all to be safe!

There’s a piece of gum stuck to the underside of one of Raphaella’s lab benches. She doesn’t want to know how long it’s been there, since she only found it while lying on the floor and staring blankly into the table above her. By now, she can’t remember why she got down here in the first place. But the gum should be taken care of before it starts growing too many bacteria, so she drags herself off the ground with a groan and starts searching for her measly stash of cleaning supplies.

It takes a few attempts to find something caustic enough to get rid of the gum, which makes her wonder if one of her past assistants was intentionally trying to make the most irritating substance in the universe. She wouldn’t put it past any of them. Especially— _ no.  _ Today, for once, she won’t let herself get caught up in thinking about him.

It’s gotten easier, over the past month or so, to tiptoe around her own thoughts like creaky floorboards, like making too much noise will bring in the monstrous tide of lonesome grief that’s been following her this entire time. Just as Raphaella la Cognizi is not supposed to cry, she’s not supposed to feel these things, either. She had expected to be over it entirely by now, but the full weight of her loneliness only continues to threaten her. Sometimes it wells in her throat like the beginnings of a sob, and other times it sits on her chest until she can hardly breathe, and either way, she feels like an impostor in her own body.

So Raphaella has a few options, as she sees it. She could easily clone… him, make herself a perfect lab assistant who could be trained from the ground up, who could keep her company and quiet the uncomfortably human parts of her brain that just want to  _ talk  _ to someone. But the more she thinks about a not-Marius wandering around her ship, following her instructions and staring at her with blank, incognizant eyes, the sicker she feels. That would be fucked up, right? She can’t imagine doing that to Marius, even a fake one. For a second, she wonders if he actually managed to imbue her with some sense of morality, which wouldn’t make sense given that he doesn’t—didn’t—have much to go around. No, she thinks, it’s just him. She can’t fathom the thought of treating him that way.

Her other idea got her through a few ill-advised nights back when she was young and lost in the universe: she could find a nicely populated planet, slip herself into a seat at a bar somewhere loud and anonymous, find someone who looks enough like him in the low light. Trick herself into thinking she’s loved. It never helped the loneliness before, and she knows it’ll sharpen the ache where Marius should be, but the need to be  _ held  _ aches in her throat so cold and cruel that she can’t reason through it.

A nasty voice in her head reminds her, over and over, that she’s an enormous hypocrite. Marius stormed off because he wanted to feel needed, and she  _ let  _ him leave, since she’s never needed anyone before. And now that he’s gone, it’s not hard for her to put the pieces together regarding her own mental state. Between the drowning loneliness and her rapidly dwindling impulse control, she is forced to conclude that, on some level, she has  _ always  _ needed other people in her life. And burying those feelings for this long has only exacerbated them.

So she was wrong, and she  _ hates  _ being wrong, and the worst part of it all is that she can’t fix it. All her indignant rage and—if she’s being honest—terror at the sudden appearance of Doctor Carmilla are still simmering in the back of her mind, mingling with the remains of the sad, soft little creature that just wants to curl up in Marius’s arms and feel connected to someone again. Even if she were capable of apologizing to anyone ever, he’s not coming back. Raphaella is well aware that she’s a difficult, callous person, and historically, she’s been happy to flaunt that fact as a way of avoiding entanglements that would otherwise bog her down.

How she wants to be entangled now.

Before she can drag herself any deeper into self-loathing, Raphaella peels herself off the lab floor and washes her hands, leaving the cleaning supplies where they are. Hopefully she’ll have the energy to deal with them later; at least the gum is gone. As she shuffles toward the bridge to adjust her course, every lingering piece of Marius snags her attention. His cabinet in the kitchen still overflows with half-eaten bags of snack food; his clothes are haphazardly stuffed in the empty corners of her drawers; she spies the tear in her sheets where his metal hand gripped them too hard during a nightmare, and the scorch mark on the ceiling the sink from one of his earlier attempts at a flambé. Well, that’s what he called it after the fact, but Raphaella is fairly certain that he was just lighting liquor on fire for the hell of it, and at the time, she had seethed at the realization that he was  _ still  _ outlandishly attractive with his eyebrows half-scorched off.

Now, she slumps into the pilot’s chair with a half-dozen images of Marius’s mischievous face burned into her eyelids. “I hate this,” she announces to no one, because hearing her own voice ought to help. It doesn’t. “Just for the fucking record. I hate this. I— _ fuck,  _ it’s not like he’s here to hear me whining.”

Instead of berating herself any further, Raphaella scans the nearest planets until she can select one with a relatively high humanoid population, punches in the coordinates, and slumps back into her chair to doze until she can find a better way to vent her frustration.

Thankfully, the planet where Carmilla found them was in a fairly dense system, so Raphaella only has to mope around for a few more hours before her ship starts to breach the atmosphere of her chosen destination. As she sits up in her chair and takes over manual controls for the landing, she peers down at the sparkling cityscape below her—gleaming, picturesque, entirely contrary to her current mood. Still, it’s impossible to have a city this big  _ without  _ a grimy underbelly, so she finds a nondescript landing pad and then goes to dress herself like a functional and non-heartbroken human being.

She spends about thirty seconds changing into a crop top that’s marginally tighter than the one she was already wearing, and then she stands in front of the mirror and preens her metal wings for half an hour. It’s more to soothe herself than to look good, since most people wouldn’t know the difference between well-kept wings and shoddy ones in the first place. Raphaella hasn’t even seen another winged person in decades, though she stuffs that thought down before it can linger for too long.

As soon as she steps off the ship, she realizes that she managed to land in a college town, as evidenced by the banners hanging from every lamppost and the pervasive smell of cheap beer and cheaper cigarettes. At least it’ll be easy to find a place to get drunk, Raphaella figures. And the town isn’t nearly as glimmery as it looked from space, so she won’t have to worry about trying to look perfect.

With two guns and about six assorted blades tucked into her clothes, Raphaella disembarks. This is only the second time she’s left the ship since Marius took the escape pod, and the first time was perhaps the most miserable grocery run of her entire life, so she’s relieved to breathe in fresh planetside air and see other living beings that aren’t cultured bacteria. Between a couple of cheap, greasy restaurants, she finds an appropriately divey bar—the only difference between it and the restaurants is the light level and the proportion of alcohol to food, as far as she can tell. She folds her wings tight over her back like a beetle to avoid turning too many heads as she steps inside.

It takes all of thirty seconds for her to abandon her original plan of ‘find someone who looks vaguely like Marius to hook up with, and then cry about it later.’ Now that she’s in the presence of other humans, she’s too overwhelmed to even consider getting near anyone else. She slides into a barstool and orders the simplest-sounding drink she can find, because she needs a point of stability  _ somewhere  _ to keep from zoning out entirely.

As the bartender turns their back to her and fiddles with a few glasses, Raphaella scans the crowd around her. Part of her is, of course, hoping to see Marius darting between the other patrons, as hard as she tries to repress the thought. Another part fears that Carmilla will stride out of the gloom with her silver cane and threaten to murder her again, or drink her blood, or—okay, Raphaella wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with  _ that,  _ but she’s getting distracted. More importantly, she keeps an eye out for potential test subjects. Marius’s arm continues to provide a wealth of interesting pathology, but she’d like to have an entire body to toy with now and again. If nothing else, it’ll take her a few steps away from her own lingering humanity.

By the time she finishes ogling the rest of the bar, her drink is sitting in front of her in a squat little glass that’s already sweating around the edges. She takes an eager sip and nearly chokes on the absurdly strong raspberry flavor. “Is this—what did you say this was called, again?” she asks the bartender, leaning forward a bit.

They hardly lift an eye toward her. “I didn’t.”

Raphaella squints at that. Usually such a fruity drink would look like it had  _ something  _ in it other than pure alcohol, and she’s suddenly intrigued by whatever compound can produce a flavor this strong without being detectable otherwise. “Are there raspberries in it?”

“Are there… what?”

Alright, so they don’t have raspberries on this planet. Raphaella suppresses a pang of longing when the taste conjures Marius’s smile in her head. “Can I see the bottle?”

At this point, the bartender has fixed her with a suspicious glare—it must be impolite to ask so many questions here, she figures. Not that she cares. A few of the other people at the bar start to murmur when she hops over it and elbows the bartender out of the way, but she ignores them in favor of grabbing the bottle and scrutinizing its label. No artificial flavors, no chemicals that she can pinpoint that might give rise to that flavor… she’s about to turn and head back to her ship, bottle tucked under her arm, when she hears the  _ click  _ of a gun cocking behind her head.

The promise of a fight swells in her chest, warm and bitter. “That’s not going to end well for you,” she says breezily, setting the bottle back down on the counter so it doesn’t get shattered if they shoot her anyway.

Then she turns around, and instead of one pissy bartender, a dozen people with matching scowls and hefty guns are spread out behind her. Either this planet takes theft  _ extremely  _ seriously, or there’s something else going on, and she doesn’t intend to stick around long enough to find out. Her wings start to spread, ready to lift her off the ground and maneuver out of the bar, though she’s probably still going to get shot a few (dozen) times, but she should be able to stab a few of them on her way out—

With a nasty  _ crack,  _ the bartender brings a bottle down on her temple, and Raphaella crumples to the ground.

\---

Marius has only lived in student housing for a day, but he has already concluded that his bed is too big. Compared to his cot in Raphaella’s lab, the creaky twin bed feels downright luxurious, and compared to Raphaella’s—well. He’s never had a bed this big without another body next to him, an arm around his waist, warm breath tickling his ear as he drifts in and out of sleep. If it weren’t for the sheer grime of the average dorm room, he might just sleep on the floor.

It took him nearly two days to figure out how to steer the escape pod, so even if he  _ had  _ changed his mind, he wouldn’t have been able to get back to the ship before Raphaella blinked out into the vastness of space. Even with the limited supply of water in the pod, he died of thirst a few times before crash-landing on a refreshingly populous planet. To his immense luck, a few curious passersby pulled him out of the wreckage—he tried not to think about what that reminded him of—and set him on his feet once they realized that he wasn’t too sickly to stand.

Since then, things have been… fuzzy. Marius is used to sleeping in alleyways and stealing for a living, so he didn’t bat an eye at any of that, but he found himself constantly turning to make snide comments to a companion who wasn’t there. Within a week, he was digging his blunt fingernails into his arm every time he had the urge to talk to Raphaella. By now, a month in, her image in his mind’s eye automatically twists his heart with dulled agony.

His epiphany came when he remembered, seemingly at random, one of the articles in a psychology journal that he had read while watching Raphaella drip various enzymes onto a chunk of what he thought was her own flesh. Something about dogs that started drooling every time you showed them the severed head of an asteroidal jellybeast, or something like that. He was conditioning himself—quite effectively, if he might add—to skip all the unfortunate memories of his mistakes and jump directly from Raphaella’s face to the emotional equivalent of pressing on a bruise.

Sure, for the time being, it kept him from dwelling on the memories, but it was almost worse to have the thought of her so unbearable in his mind. More importantly, he was overcome by the inescapable need to actually put a name to what he was doing, and that’s how he ended up breaking into the psychology library in the sprawling university not too far from where he crashed.

Marius spent about a week in the library, snoozing in the vents during the day and perusing old textbooks and journals at night, and by the time he finally emerged, he was determined to actually show his mettle as a psychologist. That’s how he ended up here, sprawled out on a dorm bed and punching his pillow as if that’ll make it as sad and floppy as the ones he’s used to.

Classes start in two days. Marius has never actually gone to school before, so he’s working off a  _ lot  _ of assumptions, but he managed to get accepted by the university without too many hiccups, so he can keep on bluffing.

As he ruminates on the last few weeks, Marius is disrupted by quiet footsteps padding by in the hallway outside and stopping right next to his door. He doesn’t think anything of it, until he hears murmuring and strains to pick up the conversation.

“They found one,” a voice hisses, just close enough for Marius to make out. He doesn’t recognize it. “We need to get there as soon as possible if we want to be included.”

Some feet shuffle against the short carpet. “You’re sure it’s not another false alarm?” This voice is familiar, a second-year student with a faceful of tentacles who gave Marius a cool welcome when he first moved in. He can’t remember her name.

“I got proof.” More shifting, a quick inhale, and then a few whispers that he can’t make out. “She’s the real thing this time.”

Dread curdles in the pit of Marius’s stomach for reasons he can’t name. Before he can process what he’s doing, he drags himself off of his bed and slumps to the door, throwing it open to catch his dormmates poring over a set of comms in deep concentration. They both turn to stare at him, not guilty but accusing, and Marius puts on his most convincing mask of nonchalance. “What?” he huffs. “If you’re gonna stand outside my room and whisper, I assume you’re just  _ desperate  _ for my presence.”

The withering glares he gets in return are almost enough to send Marius back into his room in shame, but he stands his ground. Finally, the tentacle-mouthed student rolls her eyes and sets off down the hallway at a brisk pace. “We don’t have time for this,” she snaps as the other person jogs to catch up with her. “And you should quit being a nosy fuck before it gets you hurt, von Raum.”

Before he can respond, they’re both gone, whisking around the corner and heading for the stairs. Marius retreats into his room as if minding his own business, but instead listens to their clattering footsteps on the stairs and then, cautiously, peeks out of his window to watch the pair jog across the courtyard outside. He may be nosy, sure, but something feels drastically wrong here. A few other people are heading in the same direction. Digging his gun out from under the pillow, Marius leaves his room again and sneaks down the hallway to follow from a distance.

There’s not much cover in the courtyard, so he stays back until he spies the tentacled girl entering one of the older school buildings. He hasn’t been inside before—it’s devoid of classrooms, though he figures he’ll frequent it eventually, since it’s where most of the psychology professors have their offices. As he watches, a half-dozen people slip through the door, holding it open for each other and then closing it softly behind themselves. Marius waits, again, then creeps into the building and continues to follow their footsteps, remaining just out of sight.

At first, it’s just another office building. That doesn’t stop Marius’s heart from squeezing in his throat.

After a few winding hallways, the footsteps ahead of him stop, and Marius pauses with his back pressed to the wall and waits. A horrible screeching sound, like ill-fitting metal on metal, reaches him, and then the footsteps resume again, without a word uttered between any of the other students. The subtle shuffling of their clothes and feet grows softer, until Marius feels confident enough to creep around the corner and see where they went.

It’s a trapdoor in the floor, because this school—or whatever these people are  _ actually  _ doing—evidently has no eye for subtlety. A massive panel of sheet metal, painted on one side to match the dull floor tiles, rests against the wall, revealing a set of concrete stairs that descends down underneath the building proper. The footsteps have already faded away, so Marius hurries into the secret basement without a fleeting thought for his own self-preservation.

As soon as he reaches the final step, a scream echoes from down the hallway, and his stomach turns to cold stone. He’s known, since he first heard the whispers outside his door, that something is wrong, but now that knowledge transforms from wriggling fear to a certainty that sears through him until he forgets how to breathe. He  _ knows  _ that voice.

Marius breaks into a sprint.

\---

The first thing Raphaella notices upon waking up is nausea. She feels sick in a way that makes her want to curl into the tightest shape she can form, as if her every cell is fighting back against being alive. When she turns her head to try and get a look at her surroundings, a hand grabs her by the neck and pins her in place.

“She’s awake,” says a brisk voice near her head. “We can move on to the next phase.”

All around her, other voices murmur and feet shuffle against the ground, as Raphaella blinks the grogginess from her eyes and tries to spread her wings. That’s when she feels the hands holding her down—not just the one behind her neck, but several pairs on each wing. She’s lying on her stomach, arms over her head, wings pinned next to her torso at a  _ deeply  _ uncomfortable angle, and as she begins to struggle, she realizes that she’s also shackled to whatever rough stone keeps scraping her face.

“What the fuck,” she grumbles. She’s not gagged, at least. “You are… really going to regret this in a minute.”

One of the hands on her right wing twitches, but otherwise, no one reacts to her threats. “The blade,” someone says near her feet.

Alright, so she’s about to be carved like a fucking bird. Wouldn’t be the first time. Raphaella isn’t afraid of much, and  _ pain  _ hasn’t registered as a threat since she was mortal. On her left side, a few people move and reposition her wing until it’s sticking straight out from her side, and then she hears a  _ swoosh  _ before something brutally sharp comes crashing down on the innermost joint of the appendage.

“Gonna take more than that,” she informs them. The feeling of metal on metal isn’t exactly comfortable, but she’s experimented with her own mechanism enough that she’s used to it. From her calculations, it would take temperatures well above the melting point of steel to even  _ soften  _ the scaffolding of her wings, much less sever them. “You obviously don’t know what you’re—”

“Shut up,” growls the person holding her neck, as they grind her face down into the stone. She’s going to have a busted lip after this, at least for a few minutes. “The process requires your voice, but I won’t hesitate to cut out your tongue.”

Raphaella rolls her eyes but doesn’t respond. She’s busy gritting her teeth to keep from shouting as they bring the blade down on her wing again and again, evidently not realizing that there’s no hope of cutting through it. In her head, she takes some wild guesses as to what they want—maybe they’re some kind of cult that thinks she’s a demon? That happens from time to time. Or they’ve gathered that her mechanism makes her unique somehow, and they’re trying to harness its power. That will, of course, backfire, so she just has to wait until they give up so she can kill them all and leave.

Moments later, they quit hacking at her wing and instead move to carve into her back, slicing through her shirt in the process. As soon as the blade touches her skin, rainbows dance behind her eyelids like oil on water, and pain lances through her. Not the pain she expected, though, but ice-cold agony, worse than anything she’s felt since she mechanized herself.

“It’s working,” someone says—the voice is off to her left, possibly the person wielding the blade. “See? I  _ knew  _ it!”

Raphaella wants to know what they’re trying to do. Even as they carve through her flesh, deep and harsh enough that she can’t stop screaming, she wants to  _ know.  _ Once the initial shock wears off, she can feel the knife sliding parallel to the edge of her shoulder blade, cutting around the ports where her wing connects to her back. They’re trying to cut it off from the other side, then. And they have two blades, apparently, because someone else starts tugging on her other wing and then stabs the rough scar next to the port, as if to flick it out of her back.

The pain is just as breathtaking the second time.

She can’t see what they’re doing, and it’s hard to make sense of the slicing and tearing in her own flesh. Her limbs flail and tug at the restraints fruitlessly as the mumbling voices around her rise, louder and louder, at the realization that she’s healing nearly as fast as they can cut her open. Even though her eyes are open now, all she sees is prismatic color. This has never happened before. A fraction of her wants to document it, wishes she had a camera to figure out what’s in those blades and how they can make her feel like her skin is turning to acid at their touch, but the rest of her just wants  _ out. _

Distantly, she hears the beginnings of a chant, rising from the people who aren’t actively fighting her mechanism; she doesn’t recognize the words, but something in the pit of her stomach apparently does, because it seizes until she’s half-retching against the stone under her face, and she nearly chokes on her own breath. The iridescence clouding her eyes is too bright to bear. For the first time since she was freshly mechanized, Raphaella genuinely wonders if they’ve found a way to kill her.

At some point, she must pass out, because she wakes up to her head being wrenched backward by firm hands. “This isn’t fast enough,” hisses the voice by her head. “Pull her up.  _ Quickly.” _

Raphaella is shoved off of the stone surface and onto her feet, not that she’s present enough to stand on her own. Her arms are yanked ahead of her, then secured above her head, and several pairs of hands push her into more rough-hewn stone, so she’s standing with her face pressed into the wall. Before she has time to overcome the sudden rush of dizziness from being manhandled, the knives are back again, this time accompanied by dozens of hands pulling at her wings with all their might. As if to tear them off, she thinks. That won’t work, especially since her mechanism seems determined to stitch her flesh back together even faster than usual, if only for the drama of it all.

But the rainbows are brilliant. She can’t see, and static is filling her ears, and she’s starting to think that they’ll just rip her bones out if they can’t find a way to get around her wings. Besides all of that, there’s clearly a  _ reason  _ for this amateur vivisection, though Raphaella can’t piece it together through the genuine fear bubbling in her throat.

She loses track of time. For long stretches, all she hears is the distant chanting and the rending of flesh behind her, at least while she’s conscious. No one is holding her head anymore, so it lolls to the side enough that she can barely see her feathers crumpling against the ground.

At last, another sound cuts through the chanting—an instrument? A voice? Something sweet and sad and  _ painful,  _ not like the knives carving her back, but like the constant squeezing ache in her chest that has yet to leave her. Everything around her freezes.

Then someone stabs the knife between her ribs, nearly hard enough to cut through her whole torso, and Raphaella passes out again with a gurgled scream.

\---

When Marius turns the final corner, he stops himself before he can come close enough to attract any attention. There are dozens of people in this room, all clustered around a thick stone dais and, behind it, a person chained to the wall. He already knows who it is. Even if he couldn’t see the metal wings hanging haphazardly from her back, he’d know who it is. At the sight of her, limp and bleeding, he has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming.

With so many people in the room, many of whom appear to be armed, he’s not sure that he’ll be able to get to Raphaella before they overpower him. He could get maybe six, seven shots off, and even if those hit… he doesn’t like his chances. From where he stands, he can see that they’re carving into Raphaella’s back with thick, glimmering blades that look more like scythes than scalpels, and the blood staining the steel shimmers in a thousand colors every time the chanting swells. They evidently haven’t figured out how to remove her wings, but if they get to him, Marius knows that they’d be able to hack his arm clean off without too much trouble. That could be enough to harness whatever they’re after.

For a moment, he wonders if this is what Carmilla tried to warn them about.

Marius shakes the thought from his mind and starts looking around the room for somewhere to hide. Maybe he can start sniping random members of the crowd? No, his gun isn’t built for that, and he knows that he’s too loud and obvious to pull it off. He needs a distraction, just something to get them  _ away  _ from Raphaella, and then—then he’ll figure out what to do. As he creeps along the wall, he comes to a shallow flight of stairs leading up to a raised platform, almost like a stage, which would give him better leverage to shoot from, if only…

Something moves in his right hand, wood on metal, and he looks down. For a moment, he can’t believe what he’s seeing, but then he feels a  _ different  _ object in his left hand. There’s no way he’s imagining two separate objects. His fingers close around the neck of his violin— _ his  _ violin—and he brings it to his chin without a second thought.

As soon as the bow touches the strings, tears well in the corners of Marius’s eyes. It feels so right to play again, to hold his instrument like an extension of himself, and even despite the fear and rage swimming in his throat, he is calm for the first time in weeks. He draws the bow across the strings, not playing any particular melody but simply letting the sound carry, note by note, until he gets the attention of a hapless grad student across the room.

They shout something and point at him, and as he plays faster and louder, the fury in his chest carried by the music, more and more people turn to stare. Most of them look entranced, which Marius decides to take as a compliment. Now that he has their attention, he just has to switch from playing to  _ killing,  _ but he doesn’t know how to do that without giving them too much time—too much space—

—and then one of them buries their blade hilt-deep in Raphaella’s back, and as suddenly as it appeared, his violin is no longer in his hands. Marius scrambles for his gun and fires into the crowd until they advance on him, and then braces himself and sprints headlong at his attackers.

Between the lot of them, there are plenty of knives to dodge, but Marius is fast and scrappy and, most importantly, furious. He uses his metal arm to his advantage, swinging an elbow into a windpipe here and punching a solar plexus there, all the while taking random shots whenever he has enough clearance to raise his gun. It doesn’t matter whether he kills them or just incapacitates them, only that he gets to Raphaella before the indescribable feeling in his chest consumes him entirely.

By the time he pulls himself together again, there are only two people left standing, both gawking at him in trembling terror. Marius stares back for a moment, then raises his gun, and the survivors flee down the hallway faster than he can think about shooting them.

_ Fuck.  _ They’ll probably be back eventually, so he has to move fast—though he would’ve done so anyway, given the state Raphaella is in. He reholsters his gun hastily and rushes to the wall where she hangs by her wrists, limp and unresponsive. “Raph,” he murmurs, laying a tentative hand on her shoulder. “Are you awake?”

She groans a bit, and her head rolls to one side, but she shows no sign of recognizing Marius. That’s probably for the best, since he doubts that she’ll be happy to see him after he left her ship the way he did, but even if she just kicks him out again once she’s conscious, he won’t leave her here. “I’m getting you out of here, okay?”

This time, she doesn’t respond at all. Marius looks down to assess the damage done by the chanting mob, and finds one ceremonial blade still sticking out of the middle of her back, which he pulls out as gingerly as he can. It buzzes against his skin in a way that makes him feel nauseous. He drops it on the ground, curling his lip, and grazes his fingers up the side of Raphaella’s back, as if other knives might somehow be hiding under her clothes. They didn’t actually manage to extricate the ports connecting her wings to her body, but not for lack of trying—all Marius can see is the short cylinders of metal, hacked and chipped on all sides, surrounded by deep gouges cutting slicing through her flesh at every angle. As he steps closer, preparing to catch her once he breaks her out of the handcuffs, one of her wings shifts and the port moves like a screw about to come loose, with a sickening rasp of metal on bone.

Marius closes his eyes and takes a deep breath to try and calm his roiling stomach, then prods at his metal fingers until he finds the lockpick attachment and gets to work on the cuffs. He’s not sure why she thought that his ring finger was the ideal place for a lockpick, but he’s no engineer. Being able to feel what he’s doing with the tool makes things a lot easier, and he opens one shackle, then the other, then has barely enough time to brace himself before Raphaella slumps into his arms.

Even with his knees bent and his arms out to catch her, Marius almost topples over. Now that he can see her face, even in the dim light of this weird sacrificial chamber, he can tell that she’s out cold. “Shit,” he grumbles to himself, before jostling her as gently as he can until he manages to scoop one arm under her knees and the other around her back. He winces at the sheer amount of blood soaking into his jacket sleeve. All of it—her blood, her glazed-over eyes, the knife lying useless on the floor—glows in shifting, restless colors, and Marius is terrified to think of what could’ve happened if he had been just a few minutes later.

Instead of getting lost in his own fears, he turns and heads for the stairs. No one intercepts him on the way out of the building, aside from the bodies that he trips over on his way out, and he manages to draw in a shaky breath as soon as they’re out in the cold night air. He has no idea where to take Raphaella. After killing half of his own department, he doubts that he’ll be welcome in his dorm any longer, but if Raphaella’s ship is nearby, he has no clue where. Luckily, he doesn’t exactly have many belongings to leave behind here, so he hedges his bets and starts walking toward the nearest landing pad, muttering to Raphaella all the while.

“We’re outside now,” he starts, keeping his voice casual even as it shakes. “And—hey, you’re not even leaking rainbows anymore! That’s a good sign. I’ll get you back to your ship, and get you patched up, and then—well, once you’re awake, you’ll probably want me to fuck off again. And that’s, uh, that’s fine. I don’t— _ fuck,  _ Raph, I don’t…”

He tapers off as he realizes that her gaze is fixed on him. “You’re…?”

“Raph,” he repeats. “Are you with me?”

Before he can say anything else, her eyes roll back in her head again.

Marius curses the drama of it all and walks faster. Though Raphaella is only a few inches taller than him, her wingtips dangle and drag on the ground as he walks, scraping against the rough pavement. Thankfully, as if the sheer serendipity of landing on the same planet wasn’t enough, he spies her ship as soon as he reaches the landing pad, dark and unremarkable even amidst the beat-up vessels of professors and… well, Marius honestly doesn’t know who else on this planet even needs a ship. He didn’t think they’d need a sacrificial chamber under the psychology offices either, so he’s clearly not an expert.

While the ship is biometrically locked, and was once programmed to recognize Marius as one of its own, he has no idea whether Raphaella would’ve kept his data in the system after he left. Hell, she might’ve set the system to lock him  _ out.  _ The ship itself isn’t sentient, so he has no hope of pleading with it; instead, he hurries across the landing pad and stands under the hatch, staring up at it with bated breath.

“Please, we can’t stay here,” he mumbles, as if the ship cares what he has to say. “She’s hurt, please tell me you recognize  _ her,  _ at least—”

The landing ramp opens with a hiss before he can finish pleading, and Marius blinks a few anxious tears out of his eyes. As soon as he gets a good look at the cool interior of Raphaella’s ship, his heart feels like it’s being wrung out and hung up to dry, like his whole rib cage isn’t enough to contain the twisting homesickness that slides in alongside the relief of getting Raphaella somewhere safe. He doesn’t debate with himself, only carries her through the loading bay, past the lab, down the hall, and into her room. There’s not enough space left in his mind to notice his own clothes still spilling out of her closet. With trembling arms, he stretches Raphaella out on her bed, face-down so she doesn’t get too much blood on the sheets, and then slumps to the floor and allows himself a few minutes of unrestrained sobbing.

If Raphaella wakes up and immediately wants him to leave, Marius isn’t sure what he’ll do. Even the smell of her bedroom feels like a weight on his chest, pinning him here between warm memories and the terror gripping him every time he glances up at her. His instincts tell him that this is his  _ home,  _ that leaving this place again will drive out what little good is left in him, but maybe that’s for the best. Maybe, if he can’t be good enough to be what Raphaella needs, he shouldn’t be good at all. Maybe…

He cuts himself off and staggers to his feet. Caring for her takes priority over crises of conscience, and Marius has had to patch her up before, so he can at least follow the same steps that he knows and hope that she doesn’t hate him for it. In the bathroom, he finds a washcloth and wets it, then carries it back to the bed and starts mopping the blood from Raphaella’s back, peeling away the remnants of her shirt in the process. Though her mechanism is healing, it’s taking its sweet time—he sees a faint sheen of sinew reattaching to bone, but her skin is still ragged and weeping around the edges of every wound. Marius has to wring the cloth out a few times before the bleeding slows enough to simply clean her up and leave her be. By then, her wings look a bit less pathetic, though they’ll still be in dire need of preening when she wakes up.

Marius decides against bandaging her wounds, since she told him once that it’s good for them to get some air, even if they’ll heal either way. Instead, he does his best to rinse the saturated washcloth, then throws it in with her dirty clothes, before cleaning the blood from his own arms. When he gets a good look at his own face in the mirror, covered in gore from countless murdered psychology students, he gives up and takes the fastest shower he can manage. It doesn’t feel right to make himself so at home, but maybe Raphaella will be a  _ bit  _ less furious with him if he’s not caked in blood. At least he can wear something other than the same fucking outfit, he figures. He’s missed his clothes.

After he’s dressed, Marius doesn’t know what to do with himself. He wants to sit on his side of the bed, close enough to reach Raphaella in an instant if she starts to get restless, but he doesn’t have the right to cuddle up to her anymore, especially without her permission. On the other hand, he could go cook something, supplicate himself to her with cookies or soup or—but then he’d have to leave her in here alone, and what if she started oozing rainbows again? He settles for sitting in Raphaella’s desk chair and tidying up random odds and ends, with most of his attention focused, for once, on the shaky rise and fall of Raphaella’s back as she breathes.

She’s still breathing. Regardless of her feelings, she’s alive, and Marius can ask for nothing more.

After half an hour of fiddling with her writing implements and swallowing down the anxiety in his throat, Marius notices that Raphaella is starting to shift. He looks up just in time to see her attempting to roll over, which pins her wing underneath her body and pushes it up into her back at an awkward angle, and she cries out as if she’s been stabbed all over again. Before Marius can think twice, he’s kneeling on the bed, lifting her gently off of her own wing and doing his best to soothe her.

“Shh, Raph, it’s alright,” he reassures, pulling her up to a sitting position with one hand on her shoulder and the other around her waist. “D’you want to roll this way? You can’t lie on your back right now, or you’ll just hurt yourself more. Can I help you move?”

With all his attention focused on easing her pain, Marius doesn’t notice the way Raphaella stares up at him, eyes round and mouth slack, until she speaks. “Marius?” she asks hoarsely.

Marius freezes. “Um,” he replies, “yeah, it’s—I’m here. I’m sorry if— _ oof!” _

She cuts him off by surging forward into his chest, burying her face in his shirt and clinging to him with fingers so shaky that Marius can feel them trembling against his back. Even that small movement is enough to exhaust her, and she barely manages to crawl the rest of the way into his lap before she goes limp in his arms. “I—you’re back, you  _ came back,  _ Marius? I thought I’d never see you again!”

“I’m so sorry,” he repeats, pretending to ignore the fact that she’s crying. “Raphaella, I shouldn’t have left. I was—it was—I didn’t think you’d  _ want _ to see me again, but I couldn’t leave you there—in—”

“I know,” she cuts him off. “I’m sorry too. Fuck, Marius, I forgot—well, honestly, I never really knew how to talk about shit like that, and I—you were right, you know. About me.” Raphaella looks up at him with obvious effort, her eyes bloodshot and as emotional as Marius has ever seen them. “I don’t want to be alone. I’ve been alone, and I could do it again, but I love you and I don’t  _ want  _ to be alone.”

Marius doesn’t know how to breathe. She looks so vulnerable, wings hanging limply from her back and lips trembling as she watches him, and the emotion seeping to the tips of Marius’s blushing-hot fingers is too much to bear. “I love you too,” he says. “I won’t leave unless you want me to.”

“Stay, then,” Raphaella whispers.

Without another word, Marius squeezes her tight against his chest and kisses the top of her head, soaking up the sheer joy of holding her again as she settles into his lap and adjusts so her wounds aren’t stretched too badly. They lie there for hours, while Raphaella drifts in and out of sleep and her back takes its time healing, and Marius mumbles senseless promises to her when he thinks she’s not awake to hear them. Even with blood crusted in her hair and tears in the corners of her eyes, she has never felt so  _ right  _ in his arms.

As the sun rises outside—they never even left the planet, Marius realizes, though it’s too late to berate himself now—he looks up, across the room, and realizes that his violin is sitting on a stand next to Raphaella’s keyboard, as if it’s always been waiting for him to return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WAHOO! I did not know this one was gonna get so long, but I was genuinely near tears writing the end of this, I've been daydreaming about it for So Long and they just LOVE EACH OTHER and I have feelings about it ;-; I really hope you all enjoy this; please let me know if I missed any big tags, because this one was A Lot! I had a few people read over it to make sure it wasn't too much for an M rating, but it performed well with test audiences lol. I really appreciate every one of you so so much. Getting feedback on my fics is..... very important to me and really keeps me going, and I love knowing how much I can affect other people by making the funky bi cyborgs smooch a bunch.
> 
> one more chapter!! we're almost there!!! <3


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